Implicit Attitudes towards Homosexuality: Reliability, Validity, and Controllability of the IAT

Abstract

Abstract. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the psychometric properties of an Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998 ) that was adapted to measure implicit attitudes towards homosexuality. In a first experiment, the validity of the Homosexuality-IAT was tested using a known group approach. Implicit and explicit attitudes were assessed in heterosexual and homosexual men and women (N = 101). The results provided compelling evidence for the convergent and discriminant validity of the Homosexuality-IAT as a measure of implicit attitudes. No evidence was found for two alternative explanations of IAT effects (familiarity with stimulus material and stereotype knowledge). The internal consistency of IAT scores was satisfactory (αs > .80), but retest correlations were lower. In a second experiment (N = 79) it was shown that uninformed participants were able to fake positive explicit but not implicit attitudes. Discrepancies between implicit and explicit attitudes towards homosexuality could be partially accounted for by individual differences in the motivation to control prejudiced behavior, thus providing independent evidence for the validity of the implicit attitude measure. Neither explicit nor implicit attitudes could be changed by persuasive messages. The results of both experiments are interpreted as evidence for a single construct account of implicit and explicit attitudes towards homosexuality.

Implicit and Explicit Occupational Gender Stereotypes

“…Although several studies have shown good reliability and validity for the IAT (Banse, Seise, & Zerbes, 2001;Greenwald & Nosek, 2001), correlations with demonstrably reliable and valid explicit measures have been only modest (Brunel, Tietje, & Greenwald, 2004;Cunningham, Preacher, & Banaji, 2001;Kawakami & Dovidio, 2001). Our results are similar.…”

Implicit and Explicit Measurements of Sexual Preference in Gay and Heterosexual Men: A Comparison of Priming Techniques and the Implicit Association Task

“…We reasoned that sexual preference for male versus female partners was a fundamental part of a person's persona and would, therefore, be expected to be reflected in all measurements of sexual orientation. The issue of whether these implicit measurements can index a person's sexual orientation has not been previously reported, though we note that attitudes about homosexuality has been measured by implicit techniques (Banse, Seise, & Zerbes, 2001;Nosek, 2005) as have attitudes towards sexuality (Geer & Robertson, 2005). We predicted that the implicit measure(s) would be able to predict group membership with a high degree of accuracy and that there should be a close correspondence with the explicit statements of sexual preference.…”

An implicit non-self-report measure of attitudes to speeding: Development and validation

“…The IAT has been successfully employed to assess attitudes associated with obesity (Burgess and Faunce, 2006;Faunce and Golding, 2002), homosexuality (Banse et al, 2001;Steffens and Buchner, 2003), smoking (Swanson et al, 2001), presidential candidates (Nosek et al, 2002), consumer products (Brunel et al, 1999;Maison et al, 2001), and social anxiety (Tanner et al, 2006). Further, several studies have shown that IAT measures correlate as expected with group membership classifications (see Greenwald and Nosek, 2001 for a review).…”