Research with implicit measures has been criticized for an unclear meaning of the term implicit and inadequate psychometric properties, as well as problems regarding internal validity and low predictive validity of implicit measures. To these criticisms, we add an overly restrictive theoretical focus and research agenda that is limited to the narrow dichotomy between associations versus propositional beliefs. In this article, we address the last problem by introducing a new perspective of a sub-personal psychology. This broad approach expands the conceptual horizon in order to make use of the full potential that experimental paradigms can offer for assessing, explaining, predicting, and modifying human functioning and behavior. Going beyond the analysis of associations and beliefs, we highlight the use of experimental paradigms to examine and modify motivational, environmental, and episodic memory factors that influence human action.
Objective: Correlational research aiming to validate measures and the construct of implicit self-esteem (ISE) has produced heterogeneous results in the past. We argue that this might be caused by two underappreciated obstacles: the situational malleability of and the construct irrelevant variance in conventional ISE measures. In this study, we aim to address these problems. Methods:To this end, we applied process and latent state-trait modeling to Implicit Association Test and Name Letter Task data collected on four occasions across six weeks in a preregistered online study (initial N = 360, final N = 302).We investigated the relation of supposed trait ISE parameters with trait explicit self-esteem (ESE) and a set of criteria. Results: Results indicated no latent trait correlation among the different supposed indicators of ISE, small latent trait correlations of indicators of ISE and ESE, and little incremental validity of the supposed ISE measures in predicting potential criterion measures over and above ESE.Conclusions: These findings align with previous critical evaluations regarding the supposed measures of ISE and the conceptual validity of ISE as an association and call for a more careful terminology in the field.
Measures of automatic propositional self-evaluation have been shown to predict adverse outcomes above and beyond measures of deliberate self-evaluation, thereby suggesting an independent source of automatic self-evaluation that might also provide a pathway to change self-esteem and its correlates. Based on theoretical models of automatic, proposition-based evaluative cognition, we hypothesize that automatic self-evaluation can be changed by raising the accessibility of specific truth-values in the presence of self-positive and self-negative statements. To test this hypothesis, we exposed N = 160 participants to a learning procedure based on the Propositional Evaluation Paradigm on three consecutive days. This procedure implemented contingencies between self-positive statements and truth in one condition and between self-positive statements and falsity in the other condition. Investigating the performance of the participants in the learning procedure itself, we found evidence for short-term effects of the contingencies as well as cumulative effects across days. However, the learning procedure had no effect on external criteria such as questionnaires of affect and self-esteem as well as the preference for one’s own initials. Implications and suggestions for future research on the malleability of automatic propositional self-evaluation are discussed.
Krause et al. (2012) demonstrated that evaluative responses elicited by self-related primes in an affective priming task have incremental validity over explicit self-esteem in predicting self-serving biases in performance estimations and expectations in an anagram task. We conducted a conceptual replication of their experiment in which we added a behavioral and an affective outcome and presented names instead of faces as self-related primes. A heterogeneous sample (N = 96) was recruited for an online data collection. Name primes produced significantly positive and reliable priming effects, which correlated with explicit self-esteem. However, neither these priming effects nor explicit self-esteem predicted the cognitive, affective, or behavioral outcomes. Despite the lack of predictive validity of the implicit measure for affective and behavioral outcomes, the positive and reliable priming effects produced by name primes warrant the further investigation of the validity of the affective priming paradigm as a measure of implicit self-esteem.
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