Reliability and validity of the Single‐Target IAT (ST‐IAT): assessing automatic affect towards multiple attitude objects

Abstract

In contrast to the original Implicit Association Test (IAT), the Single-Target Implicit Association Test (ST-IAT) measures the evaluation of a target object without the need to simultaneously evaluate a counter-category. The present research investigates (a) whether position within a series of several ST-IATs affects reliability and validity, and (b) whether the ST-IAT exhibits adequate construct validity if the target objects are closely interrelated. We address these questions by taking five interrelated yet distinct political parties in Germany as an exemplary domain. The ST-IAT reliably and validly assessed attitudes towards political parties (Study 1). Serial position effects did not affect the results. The ST-IATs mostly captured a specific party evaluation and exhibited discriminant validity. At the same time, discriminant validity was limited among parties within one wing of the political left-right spectrum that underlies implicit and explicit party evaluations (Study 2). If used with caution, the ST-IAT can be a valuable supplement to implicit measures in the case of multiple single-target assessments. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The aim of this paper is to illuminate the usefulness of a new implicit measure tailored to assess automatic affective reactions-the Single-Target Implicit Association Test (ST-IAT;Wigboldus, Holland, & van Knippenberg, 2004; cf. Karpinski & Steinman, 2006)-and to explore the methodological properties of this recent offspring of the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). In particular, we investigate whether the ST-IAT can achieve what has not been demonstrated for other implicit tools so far, namely, to reliably and validly assess the evaluation of several (five) interrelated target objects-while remaining resistant to fatigue or exercise effects in a line of repeated measurements.Scientists have developed several indirect approaches to tapping automatic affective components that are important for guiding spontaneous behaviour (Fazio & Olson, 2003). The IAT has gained particular support as a tool for the assessment of such spontaneous evaluations. While acknowledging the IAT's valuable features (flexibility, reliability, validity;Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2006), it has been pointed out that (a) IATs provide only an ambiguous answer to the question of the absolute evaluation of target concepts (Blanton, Jaccard, Gonzales, & Christie, 2006;Fiedler, Messner, & Bluemke, 2006;Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2005), (b) the choice of a counter-category against which the target object of interest is contrasted may pose a natural complement (e.g. men vs. women), but in many cases the choice of category is highly subjective (compare a liberal/conservative IAT to a liberal/socialist IAT; Karpinski, 2004) and (c) the evaluation of multiple target concepts such as social groups within a multi-ethnic nation (e.g. White vs. Asian Americans, White vs. African Americans, African vs. Asian Americans; Devos & Banaji, 2005) requires num...

Gender Differences in Liking and Wanting Sex: Examining the Role of Motivational Context and Implicit Versus Explicit Processing

“…The traditional IAT requires two complementary categories for the attitude object (e.g., "Black" and "White") and responses to the contrast category may influence the IAT score, creating ambiguity in the interpretation of this score. Therefore, we eliminated the second contrast category such that we could measure evaluative associations with a single category object, namely sex (for more information on the validity of the single category IAT, see Bluemke & Friese, 2008;Karpinski & Steinman, 2006). Each stage was preceded by a short instruction of the subsequent task, reminding the participants of the dimensions of the categorization task and the exact key-assignment.…”

Heavy social drinkers score higher on implicit wanting and liking for alcohol than alcohol-dependent patients and light social drinkers

“…Luckily, nonrelative implicit measures exist. For instance, the single-target IAT (ST-IAT) is a variant of the IAT in which only one target category is used (e.g., Bluemke & Friese, 2007;Karpinski & Steinman, 2006). Second, negative associations could possibly reflect internalized societal views regarding alcohol use ("other people view drinking as something bad") instead of a lack of pleasurable alcohol effects (e.g., .…”

“…Our aim was to examine "wanting" and "liking" in three groups of participants: alcohol-dependent patients, heavy social drinkers, and light social drinkers. Methods:Participants performed two different single target implicit association tests (ST-IATs; e.g., Bluemke & Friese, 2007) and explicit ratings that were designed to measure "liking" and "wanting" for alcohol. Results: Our results are in sharp contrast with the theories of both Robinson and Berridge and Koob and LeMoal: heavy drinkers had higher scores than light drinkers and alcohol-dependent patients on both the wanting ST-IAT and the liking ST-IAT.…”

Evaluating Implicit Sentiments for Sinners and Sins: A Cross-cultural Investigation

“…Recently, several researchers have been using a variation termed the Single-Category IAT (Bohner, Siebler, Gonzales, Haye & Schmidt, 2008;Friese, Bluemke & Wanke, 2007;Houben & Wiers, 2009;Karpinski & Steinman, 2006;Penke, Eichstaedt, & Asendorpf, 2006;Siebler et al, 2010; for a discussion of the reliability and validity of such IAT's, see Bluemke & Friese, 2008). In these IAT's, participants only categorize instances from one target category at a time, with either negative or positive instances.…”