The Best Way to Measure Explicit Racial Attitudes Is to Ask About Them

Abstract

Direct assessments of explicit racial attitudes, such as reporting an overt preference for White versus Black people, may raise social desirability concerns and reduce measurement quality. As a result, researchers have developed more indirect self-report measures of explicit racial attitudes. While such measures dampen social desirability concerns, they may weaken measurement quality by assessing construct-irrelevant attitudes, thereby lowering correspondence between measure and construct. To investigate whether direct or indirect selfreport measures better assess explicit racial attitudes, participants (N > 800,000) completed an implicit racial attitude measure and a subset of over 400 items that varied in the degree to which they were indirect or direct assessments of self-reported racial attitudes. More direct assessments of racial preferences were better predictors of implicit racial attitudes and maximized differences between Black and White participants. These results suggest that the best method to measure individuals' explicit racial attitudes is to ask about them directly.Word count: 150

A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures

“…The principle of correspondence predicts that measures are better predictors of behavior when they are measured at the same level of specificity (Ajzen, 1988;Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975;Sutton, 1998) and assess the same contents (Gawronski, in press). Supporting this principle, implicit and explicit measures are more strongly correlated with each other when they share the same level of specificity (Axt, 2018;Greenwald et al, 2009;Hofmann et al, 2005). Implicit and behavioral measures are also more strongly correlated with each other when the measures are correspondent, although investigators find this pattern less reliably (Greenwald et al, 2009;Kurdi et al, 2018;Oswald et al, 2013).…”

Implicit Transgender Attitudes Independently Predict Beliefs About Gender and Transgender People

“…Measures that best reduce random error will strengthen these correlations, so IATs that produce stronger IMPLICIT TRANSGENDER ATTITUDES 9 correlations with related outcomes should be considered better measures of the construct. See Axt (2018) for parallel reasoning when evaluating measures of explicit racial attitudes.…”

“…Given this assumption, measures that show larger group differences will thus be considered superior measures. A similar approach of comparing strength of known-group differences has been used when evaluating measures of explicit racial attitudes (Axt, 2018), measures of implicit political attitudes (Bar-Anan & , or scoring algorithms for a single implicit measure (Nosek et al, 2014).…”

Understanding Implicit Bias: Putting the Criticism into Perspective

“…More recently, Axt () assembled a large body of evidence from Project Implicit that suggests that many explicit measures of racial attitudes suffer by virtue of being too indirect, for example, by measuring attitudes toward affirmative action as a proxy for attitudes toward African Americans. While these indirect self‐report measures may be less likely to be influenced by participants' self‐presentation concerns, they may introduce noise by virtue of measuring beliefs and attitudes not directly related to race.…”