The Implicit Association Test at age 20: What is known and what is not known about implicit bias

Abstract

[Version 3 (uploaded 21 April 2020) provides corrected list of co-authors and commenters; the ms. is otherwise unchanged from Versions 1 and 2.] Scientific interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has produced a large corpus of empirical findings. In addition to much evidence for validity and usefulness of Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures, there have been psychological critiques of empirical findings and theoretical disagreements about interpretation of IAT findings. Because of public attention drawn by the concept of implicit bias, commercial and other applications based on the concept of implicit bias have been developed by non-psychologists—some of these applications are not appropriately guided by the existing body of research findings. This article is in 5 parts: (1) review of best practices for research use of IAT measures, (2) summary of what has been confidently learned from empirical research using IAT measures, (3) accepted and controversial theoretical interpretations of IAT findings, (4) significant questions about the IAT and implicit bias that still await answer, and (5) questions arising in attempts to apply research findings to remedy unintended discrimination due to implicit biases.

The relationship between self-traumatized and self-vulnerable automatic associations and posttraumatic stress symptoms among adults who have experienced a distressing life event

“…In relation to the IAT itself, there is an open and ongoing debate as to what the IAT actually measures, how its results should be interpreted, and which factors may influence its results (e.g., contextual and administration elements). It is beyond the scope of this paper to include an in-depth discussion of these issues, but they are well-documented within the literature (e.g., Greenwald et al, 2020).…”

“…me and healthy) share a response key is interpreted as providing an indirect measure of the strength of the target-attribute associations. The IAT has been extensively used across many areas of emotional psychopathology (e.g., Roefs et al, 2011;Teachman et al, 2019), and many domains of psychology more broadly (Greenwald et al, 2020).…”

Assessing alcohol-related beliefs using pictographic representations: a systematic approach to the development and validation of the revised alcohol expectancy task

“…alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages), with changes in response times indicating participants' underlying beliefs. While the IAT has faced mounting scrutiny (see Greenwald et al, 2020 for full review), with some research questioning its underlying assumptions (see Yamaguchi & Beattie, 2020), such implicit assessments have been developed to include pictorial and contextual information, with such stimuli able to better mimic real-life drinking episodes (Monk et al, 2016;Nees et al, 2011) and take into consideration research which suggest that context can also impact alcohol-related beliefs (e.g. Monk & Heim, 2013b, 2013c.…”

What Might Books Be Teaching Young Children About Gender?

“…Each of these stereotypes has been demonstrated in behavioral studies using both explicit measures (e.g., asking “How strongly do you associate career and family with males and females?”) and implicit measures, such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al, 1998; Table 3). The IAT quantifies these associations using reaction time in a word-categorization task (e.g., women–good, men–bad vs. women–bad, men–good), though not without criticism about its validity (Greenwald et al, 2021; Oswald et al, 2013). Faster responses are taken to indicate that two categories are more closely cognitively associated.…”