How to Administer the Initial Preference Task

Abstract

Individuals like their name letters more than non‐name letters. This effect has been termed the Name Letter Effect (NLE) and is widely exploited to measure implicit (i.e. automatic, unconscious) self‐esteem, predominantly by means of the Initial Preference Task (IPT). Methodological research on how to best administer the IPT is, however, scarce. In order to bridge this gap, the present paper assessed the advantages and disadvantages of different types of IPT administrations with two meta‐analyses (k = 49; N = 11,514) and a follow‐up experiment (N = 449). As a result, a new type of administration is recommended which (1) treats the effects of the first and the last name initials separately, (2) uses a duplicate administration for reliability reasons, (3) uses the likability as well as the attractiveness item wording and (4) exploits not only letters but also numbers (i.e. birthday number effect) to measure implicit self‐esteem. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

More Complex than Previously Thought: New Insights into The Optimal Administration of the Initial Preference Task

“…Stieger & C. Burger measures (Stieger & Burger, 2010;Stieger, Formann, & Burger, 2011;Stieger, Voracek et al, 2012). The current study extends the findings of prior studies concerning differences between the two measures by revealing higher retest reliabilities for the first name initial compared to the last name initial (nonrecognizers: r tt ¼ .67 vs. .49; z ¼ 2.15, p ¼ .03).…”

“…Since it was also an aim of the current study to look at a possible non-initial name-letter effect, we calculated an unbiased baseline score, which was based on non-name letters only. 5 In addition, effects on the first name and last name were treated as separate measures (Stieger & Burger, 2010;Stieger, Voracek et al, 2012) resulting in four measures of implicit selfesteem: first-name initial (IPT-first-initial), last-name initial (IPT-last-initial), firstname non-initials (IPT-first-non-initial), and last-name non-initials (IPT-last-noninitial). Furthermore, we analyzed the answers to the open question about which letters/ symbols had a special meaning for participants during the IPT.…”

“…We used the recently recommended I algorithm ), a duplicate administration, and separated the IPT scores for the first and last name (Stieger, Voracek, et al, 2012).…”

“…has suggested using a duplicate administration to raise reliability (Rudolph, Schro¨der-Abe´, Schu¨tz, Gregg, & Sedikides, 2008) and to calculate the IPT scores separately for the first and last name initials (Stieger, Voracek et al, 2012). However, as brought up by Krizan (2008), one issue still remains to be resolved.…”

Implicit Anxiety: No Evidence for a Relation with Childhood Fears and Parental Rearing Behaviour

“…Reasons for this are still not entirely understood (for a discussion, see Lane, Banaji, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2007). Different measures might assess different mental processes assuming that there is not one implicit evaluation but rather several which are largely unrelated (e.g., Back, Krause, Hirschmüller, Stopfer, Egloff, & Schmukle, 2009;Stieger, Voracek, & Formann, 2012). So some aspects of implicit evaluations might be built in childhood, whereas others are built more recently.…”