5 Dec 2002 15 34 AR AR178 PS54 12 tex AR178 PS54 12 sgm LaTeX2e 2002 01 18 P1 FHD 10 1146 annurev psych 54 101601 145225 Annu Rev Psychol 2003 54 297 327 doi 10 1146 annurev psych 54 101601 145225 c 2003 by Annual Reviews All rights reserved Copyright First published online as a Review in Advance on August 6 2002 IMPLICIT MEASURES IN SOCIAL COGNITION RESEARCH Their Meaning and Use Russell H Fazio and Michael A Olson Department of Psychology Ohio State University Columbus Ohio 43210 1222 e mail Fazio psy ohio state edu Key Words attitude measurement automatic processing priming Implicit Association Test Abstract Behavioral scientists have long sought measures of important psychological constructs that avoid response biases and other problems associated with direct reports Recently a large number of such indirect or implicit measures have emerged We review research that has utilized these measures across several domains including attitudes self esteem and stereotypes and discuss their predictive validity their interrelations and the mechanisms presumably underlying their operation Special attention is devoted to various priming measures and the Implicit Association Test largely due to their prevalence in the literature We also attempt to clarify several unresolved theoretical and empirical issues concerning implicit measures including the nature of the underlying constructs they purport to measure the conditions under which they are most likely to relate to explicit measures the kinds of behavior each measure is likely to predict their sensitivity to context and the construct s potential for change CONTENTS INTRODUCTION SOME OPENING OBSERVATIONS Where s the Theory Where s the Implicit THE RELATION BETWEEN IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MEASURES PREDICTIVE VALIDITY OF IMPLICIT MEASURES Priming Measures Implicit Association Test Other Measures QUESTIONABLE INTERRELATIONS AMONG IMPLICIT MEASURES UNDERLYING MECHANISMS What Drives Priming What Drives the Implicit Association Test Implications 0066 4308 03 0203 0297 14 00 298 301 301 302 303 305 305 307 310 311 312 313 313 315 297 5 Dec 2002 15 34 298 AR FAZIO AR178 PS54 12 tex AR178 PS54 12 sgm LaTeX2e 2002 01 18 P1 FHD OLSON EFFECTS OF CONTEXT ON IMPLICIT MEASURES ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH Role of Awareness Stereotype Versus Attitude Activation Changing Automatically Activated Constructs FINAL THOUGHTS 317 318 318 319 319 320 INTRODUCTION Over the past few years there has been a surge of interest in the use of implicit measurement techniques in social psychological research If this assertion needed any verification one merely has to call attention to the special issues of four journals recently devoted to the topic Journal of Experimental Social Psychology on Unconscious Processes in Stereotyping and Prejudice Banaji 1997 Cognition and Emotion on Automatic Affective Processing De Houwer Hermans 2001 Zeitschrift fu r Experimentelle Psychologie on Attitude Measurement Using the Implicit Association Test IAT Plessner Banse 2001 and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on Implicit Prejudice and Stereotyping How Automatic Are They Devine 2001 The research has involved a variety of domains including attitudes e g Fazio et al 1995 Greenwald et al 1998 stereotypes e g Wittenbrink et al 1997 Nosek et al 2002a self esteem Hetts et al 1999 Bosson et al 2000 Koole et al 2001 Rudman et al 2001b close relationships e g Banse 1999 and health behavior e g Stacy et al 1997 A variety of different implicit measurement techniques have been employed One such technique involves various priming procedures that have proven useful in the past as a means of assessing what is activated from memory by the presentation of some attitude object e g Gaertner McLaughlin 1983 Fazio et al 1986 Greenwald et al 1989 Perdue et al 1990 For example Fazio et al 1995 examined the consequences of priming participants with photos of black versus white undergraduates The participants primary task was to indicate the connotation of an evaluative adjective e g pleasant or awful as quickly as possible In the context of a cover story concerning the judgment of word meaning being an automatic skill that should not be disrupted by the participants having to perform an additional task simultaneously each target adjective was preceded by the brief presentation of a photo Participants were instructed to attend to these faces so that they would be able to pick them out in a later phase of the experiment The black and white faces had different consequences for the latency with which participants could indicate the connotation of the subsequently presented target adjective Relative to what was observed for white faces black faces facilitated responding to negative adjectives and interfered with responding to positive adjectives The pattern suggests that on average negativity was automatically activated by the black primes Probably the most well known implicit measurement technique is the Implicit Association Test IAT developed by Greenwald et al 1998 This procedure 5 Dec 2002 15 34 AR AR178 PS54 12 tex AR178 PS54 12 sgm LaTeX2e 2002 01 18 P1 FHD IMPLICIT MEASURES 299 assesses the strength of an association between a target concept and an attribute dimension by considering the latency with which participants can employ two response keys when each has been assigned a dual meaning The participants task is to categorize stimuli as they appear on the screen For example in the Greenwald et al 1998 IAT concerning racial attitudes participants were first asked to categorize names e g Latonya or Betsy as typical of blacks versus whites Here race is the target concept and the keys are labeled black and white Participants then categorized a variety of clearly valenced words e g poison or gift as pleasant or unpleasant which constitutes the attribute dimension In the critical phase of the experiment these two categorization tasks were combined Participants performed this combined task twice once with one response key signifying black pleasant and the other labeled white unpleasant and once with one key meaning black unpleasant and the other white pleasant in counterbalanced order The question concerns which response mapping participants find easier to use In the Greenwald et al 1998 experiment participants were overwhelmingly faster at responding when black was paired with unpleasant than when black was paired with pleasant On average then the participants found it much easier to
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