If Nazi = Red, and Canadian = Red, does Red = Good or Bad? Testing the effects of valenced perceptual cues on Implicit Association Test performance

Abstract

After two decades of research on implicit social cognition, it has become clear many of the field's theories and practices need to be redressed. Addressed in the present paper are the assumptions and memetic ideas embedded in the language, theory, and measurement tools of so-called implicit social cognition, their historical and contemporary shortcomings, and solutions to avoid these shortcomings and improve scholarship in this field. Specifically, the present paper recommends researchers and theorists adopt more accurate and epistemically honest language in their work, and determine what measures of implicit social cognition measure through experimental research rather than through empirically unjustifiable assumptions. Contributing to this endeavour, the present paper includes an experiment testing whether performance on the Implicit Association Test (IAT) can be changed through the indirect activation of complex associations. Here it is demonstrated that performance on IAT appears to be unaffected by indirectly activated complex associations, ruling out a possible cognitive mechanism that could contribute to performance on the IAT.