Implicit Attitudes and Racism: Effects of Word Familiarity and Frequency on the Implicit Association Test

Abstract

Schwartz (1998) described a new method-the Implicit Association Test (IAT)-for unobtrusively measuring racial attitudes. This article assesses the validity of the IAT by investigating whether Greenwald et al.'s implicit racism findings resulted from two confounds present in their studies: differential familiarity and frequency of the words that comprised their target concepts. Experiment 1 produced large IAT effects when both low and high familiarity words comprised nonsocial target categories (insects and flowers) and demonstrated that the IAT is more sensitive when high familiarity exemplars form the target concepts. In Experiment 2, we obtained large implicit racism effects for both African American and Hispanic racial groups even when the familiarity and frequency of the names that comprised the racial categories were controlled and even though participants described themselves as unprejudiced. Additionally, explicit self-reports of racial attitudes were only weakly related to the IAT measures. These experiments indicate that (a) although familiarity clearly exerts an important influence on the IAT, the use of low familiarity stimuli does not eliminate the sensitivity of the IAT, (b) stimulus familiarity and frequency can not account for the implicit racism effect and (c) stimulus familiarity is an important moderating variable that can influence the sensitivity of

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“…Furthermore, effects obtained with the IAT were quite robust over variations in the manner of treating data from incorrect responses and from non-normal response latency distributions. Subsequent research has extended evidence for the IAT's internal validity by establishing that the IAT's association measures are not influenced by variation in familiarity of items used to represent contrasted attitude-object concepts (Dasgupta, McGhee, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2000;Ottaway, Hayden, & Oakes, 2001;Rudman, Greenwald, Mellott, & McGhee, 1999).…”

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“…IAT measures have typically displayed good internal consistency (Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000;Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001;Greenwald & Farnham, 2000;Greenwald & Nosek, 2001); IAT measures are not influenced by wide variations in subjects' familiarity with IAT stimuli (Dasgupta et al, 2000;Ottaway, Hayden, & Oakes, 2001); and IAT measures are relatively insensitive to procedural variations such as the number of trials, the number of exemplars per concept, and the time interval between trials (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998;Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2005). Test-retest reliability of IAT measures was recently reported to have a median value of r ϭ 0.56 across nine available reports .…”

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“…Psychometrically, the IAT appears to have adequate internal consistency and temporal stability (Cunningham, Preacher, & Banaji, 2001), although these are often weak in comparison to self-report, explicit measures (such as Likert scales) of the same constructs. Also, several procedural artifacts have little effect upon IAT responses, including the words chosen to repre-sent the categories, as long as they are somewhat familiar (Ottaway, Hayden, & Oakes, 2001), the number of exemplars in the categories, and intertrial interval (Greenwald et al, 1998).…”