Intention Invention and the Affect Misattribution Procedure

Abstract

A recent study of the affect misattribution procedure (AMP) found that participants who retrospectively reported that they intentionally rated the primes showed larger effect sizes and higher reliability. The study concluded that the AMP's validity depends on intentionally rating the primes. We evaluated this conclusion in three experiments. First, larger effect sizes and higher reliability were associated with (incoherent) retrospective reports of both (a) intentionally rating the primes and (b) being unintentionally influenced by the primes. A second experiment manipulated intentions to rate the primes versus targets and found that this manipulation produced systematically different effects. Experiment 3 found that giving participants an option to "pass" when they felt they were influenced by primes did not reduce priming. Experimental manipulations, rather than retrospective self-reports, suggested that participants make post hoc confabulations to explain their responses. There was no evidence that validity in the AMP depends on intentionally rating primes.

Assessing Children’s Implicit Attitudes Using the Affect Misattribution Procedure

“…Payne et al, 2013). In our studies we found that a handful of children judged the prime images (n = 3, 4% in Study 1; n = 1, 2% in Study 2; n = 3, 3.5% in Study 3) and these participants were removed from the analyses.…”

“…Although participants provide an explicit response for each neutral target, research has provided evidence that the AMP is resistant to intentional responding as participants are unable to correct for the affect activated by the prime (Payne et al, 2005). Across several studies, even when adult participants were motivated to appear unbiased or were instructed to control for the influence of the prime, their judgments of neutral targets were systematically influenced by the valence of the preceding prime (Payne et al, 2013;Payne, Burkley, et al, 2008;Payne et al, 2005;cf. Bar-Anan & Nosek, 2012).…”

Generalization versus contextualization in automatic evaluation revisited: A meta-analysis of successful and failed replications.

“…Priming effects in the AMP are indicated by larger proportions of "pleasant" responses when participants were primed with a positive stimulus than when they were primed with a negative stimulus. AMP effects are typically considered "automatic" in the sense that the primes influence responses to the targets in an unintentional manner (see Gawronski & Ye, 2015;Payne, Brown-Iannuzzi, Burkley, Arbuckle, & Cooley, 2013). Yet, an important question is whether renewal effects generalize to other measures beyond the AMP.…”

Cultural Adaptation (Im)possible? Measuring Prejudice in Japan With the Affect Misattribution Procedure

“…Last but not least, Payne et al (2005) were able to show that people's motivation to control their prejudiced reactions moderated the relationship between a racial prejudice AMP and self-reports of racial prejudice such that indirect-direct correlations were higher, the lower the motivation to control prejudiced reactions was (see also Payne, Burkley, & Stokes, 2008). Of course, future research will have to reveal whether-as for the IAT-there are confounding variables that exert unwanted influences on AMP effects (e.g., Bar-Anan & Nosek, 2012; but see Payne et al, 2013, for a reply). So far, however, the AMP appears to be a promising, if not the most promising, alternative to the IAT.…”