A Multitrait-Multimethod Validation of the Implicit Association Test

Abstract

Abstract. Recent theoretical and methodological innovations suggest a distinction between implicit and explicit evaluations. We applied Campbell and Fiske's (1959) classic multitrait-multimethod design precepts to test the construct validity of implicit attitudes as measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Participants (N = 287) were measured on both self-report and IAT for up to seven attitude domains. Through a sequence of latent-variable structural models, systematic method variance was distinguished from attitude variance, and a correlated two-factors-per-attitude model (implicit and explicit factors) was superior to a single-factor-per-attitude specification. That is, despite sometimes strong relations between implicit and explicit attitude factors, collapsing their indicators into a single attitude factor resulted in relatively inferior model fit. We conclude that these implicit and explicit measures assess related but distinct attitude constructs. This provides a basis for, but does not distinguish between, dual-process and dual-representation theories that account for the distinctions between constructs. Keywords: implicit social cognition, attitudes, individual differences, construct validity, structural equation modelingRealizing that the human mind is more than the sum of its conscious processes, a number of theorists have proposed a conceptual distinction between evaluations that are the products of introspection, called explicit attitudes, and those that occur automatically and may exist outside of conscious awareness, called implicit attitudes (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). Greenwald and Banaji (1995, p. 8), for example, defined implicit attitudes as "introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feelings toward an attitude object." This theory has developed in conjunction with the invention of measurement tools that assess automatic evaluative associations without introspection (e.g., Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986;Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998;Nosek & Banaji, 2001;Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 1997).Some experiences with these new measurement tools have spawned doubts about whether they measure attitudes at all (Karpinski & Hilton, 2001), and whether a conceptual distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes is worthwhile (Fazio & Olson, 2003). Fazio and Olson contend "it is more appropriate to view the measures as implicit or explicit, not the attitude (or whatever other construct)" (2003, p. 303). The purpose of the research we report was to test whether the structure of attitude variance derived from an implicit measure (the Implicit Association Test [IAT]; Greenwald et al., 1998) and from an explicit one (semantic differentials) is best represented by one latent factor or by two correlated latent factors, when stripped of confounding method variance. If our hypothesis that the latter specification will fit the data better is sustained, it will support a view ...

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