The Affect Misattribution Procedure has attracted considerable attention and use in psychological science as a measure of evaluations, attitudes, and biases. The AMP’s appeal to researchers is based in large part on the promise that it taps into unintentional and unaware (i.e., implicit) psychological processes. However, past claims about the implicitness of AMP effects may be inaccurate due to a range of methodological, statistical, and conceptual issues. We re-examine a key premise underpinning the AMP’s use (i.e., that AMP effects are driven by the unaware influence of primes on responses). Across five pre-registered experiments (N = 1021) plus meta-analyses, we demonstrate that AMP effects and their predictive validity are primarily driven by a subset of influence-aware trials (within individuals), and high rates of influence-awareness (between individuals). Counterintuitively, an individual’s influence-awareness rate in one AMP predicts their performance in a previously completed AMP, even when the AMPs assess entirely different attitude domains. Taken together, our results suggest that AMP effects are not particularly implicit, are not mediated by misattribution, and furthermore do not represent an equally valid measure of attitudes across individuals. All materials and data available at osf.io/gv7cm.
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