An inkblot for beliefs: The Truth Misattribution Procedure

Abstract

An increasing body of evidence shows the importance of accommodating relational information within implicit measures of psychological constructs. Whereas relational variants of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) have been proposed in the past, we put forward the Truth Misattribution Procedure (TMP) as a relational variant of the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) that aims to capture implicit beliefs. Across three experiments, we demonstrate that TMP effects are sensitive to the relational information contained within sentence primes, both in the context of causal stimulus relations of a known truth value (e.g., “smoking causes cancer” vs. “smoking prevents cancer”), as well as in the domain of gender stereotypes (e.g., “men are arrogant” vs. “men should be arrogant”). The potential benefits of the TMP are discussed.

Effects on the Affect Misattribution Procedure are Strongly Moderated by Influence Awareness

“…This includes theoretical models relating to the process of misattribution itself (e.g., the process model of misattribution: Payne, Hall, Cameron, & Bishara's, 2010), as well as claims that evaluative conditioning is based on a misattribution process (Jones et al, 2009), and that psychological properties beyond evaluations can also be misattributed (Blaison, Imhoff, Hühnel, Hess, & Banse, 2012). It would also call into question a number of second-generational tasks that attempt to exploit the misattribution of meaning (the Semantic Misattribution Procedure: Sava et al, 2012) and truth (the Truth Misattribution Procedure: Cummins & De Houwer, 2019). Such measures have themselves been used to investigate psychological phenomena like gender stereotypes (Ye & Gawronski, 2018), sexual preference, (Imhoff et al, 2011), self-concept (Wong, Burkley, Bell, Wang, & Klann, 2017), and personality (Sava et al, 2012).…”

“…The AMP has also inspired a new wave of second-generation methodologies such as the Semantic Misattribution Procedure (SMP: Sava et al, 2012), the Emotion Misattribution Procedure (EMP: Rohr, Degner, & Wentura, 2015), and Truth Misattribution Procedure (TMP: Cummins & De Houwer, 2019). These tasks are predicated on the same underlying idea: that AMP-like tasks capture the misattribution of features of the prime stimuli to the targets without the awareness or intention of the participant.…”

The Shape of Belief: Developing a Mousetracking-Based Relational Implicit Measure

“…Given these limitations, relational implicit measures have been developed to capture such relational information (Cummins & De Houwer, 2019;De Houwer et al, 2015). One promising measure is the Propositional Evaluation Paradigm (PEP; Mü ller & Rothermund, 2019).…”

Twenty-Five Years of Research Using Implicit Measures

“…In addition to providing a theoretical alternative to extant dual-process theories, single-process propositional theories have inspired the development of a new class of implicit measures that aim to capture mental representations of complex relations between objects (e.g., Cummins & De Houwer, 2019;De Houwer, Heider, Roets, & Hughes, 2015; see also Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, Stewart, & Boles, 2010). The significance of this endeavor can be illustrated with the inability of traditional implicit measures to distinguish between representations of actual and ideal self in the measurement of self-esteem.…”

“…However, the same response time difference may be observed for someone with a representation of their ideal self as I want to be good. Traditional implicit measures are insensitive to such differences, but they can be captured with implicit measures designed to assess patterns of relational responding (e.g., Barnes-Holmes et al, 2010;Cummins & De Houwer, 2019;De Houwer et al, 2015).…”