The Single Category Implicit Association Test as a measure of implicit social cognition.

Abstract

The Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT) is a modification of the Implicit Association Test that measures the strength of evaluative associations with a single attitude object. Across 3 different attitude domains--soda brand preferences, self-esteem, and racial attitudes--the authors found evidence that the SC-IAT is internally consistent and makes unique contributions in the ability to understand implicit social cognition. In a 4th study, the authors investigated the susceptibility of the SC-IAT to faking or self-presentational concerns. Once participants with high error rates were removed, no significant self-presentation effect was observed. These results provide initial evidence for the reliability and validity of the SC-IAT as an individual difference measure of implicit social cognition.

Reducing implicit racial preferences: I. A comparative investigation of 17 interventions.

“…Another issue with the implicit measures used in this design are their relative nature -changes in IAT or MC-IAT scores may reflect changes in attitudinal responses to Blacks, Whites, or both. Future investigations using implicit measures that are more adept at targeting associations for a single object (e.g., the Single-Category IAT; Karpinski & Steinman, 2006) may shed more light on the mechanisms underlying the malleability effects found in these studies. As implicit measures mature, replicating this design with new methods will increase confidence in the theoretical interpretation of what these interventions are changing.…”

Lateralisation of self-esteem: An investigation using a dichotically presented auditory adaptation of the Implicit Association Test

“…Imaging techniques would also be useful in providing a more fine-grained assessment of the relative activation of the left versus the right hemisphere in the representation and processing of self-esteem (the results we report here do not rule out right hemisphere involvement -our correlational analysis indicates a relationship between the hemispheres) and in providing detail concerning anterior/posterior and cortical/subcortical involvement. Recent studies have indicated an important role for the medial prefrontal cortices in decisions related to self-referential judgements (Kelley et al, 2002;Vogeley et al, 2004;Mitchell et al, 2005) and future research could undertake to reconcile such findings with research concerning the lateralisation of emotion and self-esteem. Finally, replications of our results with non-linguistic stimuli (perhaps utilising presentation of Picture IAT stimuli to alternate visual hemifields) would be valuable.…”

“…An inherent limitation of this standard version is that it cannot reveal participants' evaluative associations with a single target concept (Karpinski and Steinman, 2006).…”

“…the strength of the association between self and pleasant relative to the strength of the association between other and unpleasant) rather than the absolute strengths of single associations (i.e. it cannot measure only evaluative associations with the self with no complementary category; Greenwald and Farnham, 2000;Karpinski and Steinman, 2006). This feature of the IAT means that an IAT adapted for the measurement of self-esteem will conflate positive attitudes toward the self with negative attitudes toward others (and vice versa).…”

“…Nevertheless, it is worth noting that a new IAT methodology has been developed -The Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT; Karpinski & Steinman, 2006) -that overcomes the above limitations by using only a single attitude category (e.g. self) rather than pairs of complementary attitude categories (e.g.…”