An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an attribute. The 2 concepts appear in a 2-choice task (e.g., flower vs. insect names), and the attribute in a 2nd task (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant words for an evaluation attribute). When instructions oblige highly associated categories (e.g., flower + pleasant) to share a response key, performance is faster than when less associated categories (e.g., insect + pleasant) share a key. This performance difference implicitly measures differential association of the 2 concepts with the attribute. In 3 experiments, the IAT was sensitive to (a) near-universal evaluative differences (e.g., flower vs. insect), (b) expected individual differences in evaluative associations (Japanese + pleasant vs. Korean + pleasant for Japanese vs. Korean subjects), and (c) consciously disavowed evaluative differences (Black + pleasant vs. White + pleasant for self-described unprejudiced White subjects). Consider a thought experiment. You are shown a series of male and female faces, to which you are to respond as rapidly as possible by saying "hello " if the face is male and "goodbye" if it is female. For a second task, you are shown a series of male and female names, to which you are to respond rapidly

What was noted by E. J. hanger (1978) remains true today: that much of contemporary psychological research is based on the assumption that people are consciously and systematically processing incoming information in order to construe and interpret their world and to plan and engage in courses of action. As did E. J. hanger, the authors question this assumption. First, they review evidence that the ability to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually quite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psychological life must occur through nonconscious means if it is to occur at all. The authors then describe the different possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmental control over these various phenomena and review evidence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms as well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, and

Schwartz, 1998) to measure self-esteem by assessing automatic associations of self with positive or negatlve valence. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that two IAT measures defined a factor that was distinct from, but weakly correlated with, a factor defined by standard explicit (self-report) measures of self-esteem. Experiment 2 tested known-groups validity of two IAT gender self-concept measures. Compared with well-established explicit measures, the IAT measures revealed triple the difference in measured masculinity-femininity between men and women. Again, CFA revealed construct divergence between implicit and explicit measures. Experiment 3 assessed the self-esteem IAT's validity in predicting cognitive reactions to success and failure. High implicit self-esteem was associated in the predicted fashion with buffering against adverse effects of failure on two of four measures. This research developed from the assumption that distinct im-plicit and explicit self-esteem constructs require different measure-ment strategies. In particular, the research pursued implications of Greenwald and Banaji's (1995) definition of implicit self-esteem as "the introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) effect of the self-attitude on evaluation of self-associated and

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Respondents at an Internet site completed over 600,000 tasks between October 1998 and April 2000 measuring attitudes toward and stereotypes of social groups. Their responses demonstrated, on average, implicit preference for White over Black and young over old and stereotypic associations linking male terms with science and career and female terms with liberal arts and family. The main purpose was to provide a demonstration site at which respondents could experience their implicit attitudes and stereotypes toward social groups. Nevertheless, the data collected are rich in information regarding the operation of attitudes and stereotypes, most notably the strength of implicit attitudes, the association and dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes, and the effects of group membership on attitudes and stereotypes. Among the most fundamental groups to which humans belong are their gender, race/ ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, religion, nationality, and political and intellectual orientations. Such groups typically contain large numbers of others, often spread across the world, and direct interpersonal contact with only a small subset of these individuals. Yet such membership, the mere act of belonging, can determine psychological, social, and economic fates in significant ways. Whether one is African or European, female or male, rich or

This review proposes that implicit learning processes are the cognitive substrate of social intuition. This hypothesis is supported by (a) the conceptual correspondence between implicit learning and social intuition (nonverbal communication) and (b) a review of relevant neuropsychological (Huntington's and Parkinson's disease), neuroimaging, neurophysiological, and neuroanatomical data. It is concluded that the caudate and putamen, in the basal ganglia, are central components of both intuition and implicit learning, supporting the proposed relationship. Parallel, but distinct, processes of judgment and action are demonstrated at each of the social, cognitive, and neural levels of analysis. Additionally, explicit attempts to learn a sequence can interfere with implicit learning. The possible relevance of the computations of the basal ganglia to emotional appraisal, automatic evaluation, script processing, and decision making are discussed. These "feelings " have an efficiency of operation which it is impossi-ble for thought to match. Even our most highly intellectualized operations depend upon them as a "fringe " by which to guide our inferential movements. They give us our sense of rightness and wrongness, of what to select and emphasize and follow up, and what

There has been significant interest in indirect measures of attitudes like the lmplicit Association Test (IAT), presumably because of the possibility of uncovering implicit prejudices. The authors derived a set of qualitative predictions for people's performance in the IAT on the basis of random walk models. These were supported in 3 experiments comparing clearly positive or negative categories to nonwords. They also provided evidence that participants shift their response criterion when doing the IAT. Because of these criterion shifts, a response panem in the IAT can have multiple causes. Thus, it is not possible to infer a single cause (such as prejudice) from IAT results. A surprising additional result was that nonwords were treated a. though they were evaluated more negatively than obviously negative items like insects, suggesting that low familiarity items may generate the pattern of data previously interpreted as evidence for implicit prejudice. What do you think of flowers? Would you evaluate them pos-itively? If so, what do you think of Larnists? Do you think a Larnist is more negative or more positive than a flower? As you may have realized, a Larnist is not an English word; we made it up. Presumably, you do not have a prestored opinion of Larnists, and

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is based on the observation that participants find it easier to respond in the same way to exemplars of two concepts when these concepts are similar (e.g., “positive ” and “flower”) compared to when the concepts are dissimilar (e.g., “positive ” and “insect”). In the first part of this article, I argue that the IAT is structurally similar to stimulus–response compatibility tasks. On the basis of this analogy, I then present two response conflict accounts of IAT effects. The data of an experiment that was designed to test these accounts showed that IAT effects reflect attitudes toward the target concepts rather than attitudes toward the individual exemplars of those concepts. The results shed light on the processes that underlie IAT effects, suggest that automatic attitude activation may depend on the construal of the object that is fostered by the context, and clarify the relation between different indirect measures of attitudes. © 2001 Academic Press Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz (1998) recently introduced the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The simple but ingenious idea behind the IAT is that it should be easier to map two concepts onto a single response when those concepts are somehow similar or associated in memory than when the concepts are unrelated or dissimilar. To test this idea, Greenwald et al. (1998, Experiment 1) presented

The O.J. Simpson “trial of the century ” in the mid-1990s captured the attention of the American populace more than any other public spectacle since the kidnaping of the Lindberg baby in the 1920s. A prominent football player and popular sportscaster was charged with a gruesome double homicide. The attorneys for the prosecution and defense were of various races and genders. The evidence presented on each side was at times amazingly simple, visual, and emotional, and at times was verbal, abstract, and probably incomprehensible to jurors. The witnesses included individuals of diverse styles, demeanors, and credibility. The jurors, the recipients of the messages from these various sources, were themselves a mixed group of people of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and personal experiences who had to sift through the trial material and arrive at a decision as to whether the defendant had been proven guilty or not. The context in which all of this took place was at times tense and sad, and at times filled with humor and positive feelings. Not surprisingly, no experiment has ever captured the extraordinary complexity inherent in this situation, yet almost all of the variables present in this trial (and many not present) have been examined in the social psychological literature on attitude formation and change. This chapter provides an overview of research on these diverse variables and addresses the processes by which these variables are thought to result in influence. Although it has become a cliché to say that the attitude construct is the most indispensable concept in

Results of 3 studies support the notion that anchoring is a special case of semantic priming; specifi-cally, information that is activated to solve a comparative anchoring task will subsequently be more accessible when participants make absolute judgments. By using the logic of priming research, in Study 1 the authors showed that the strength of the anchor effect depends on the applicability of activated information. Study 2 revealed a contrast effect when the activated information was not representative for the absolute judgment and the targets of the 2 judgment tasks were sufficiently different. Study 3 demonstrated that generating absolute judgments requires more time when compara-tive judgments include an implausible anchor and can therefore be made without relevant target information that would otherwise be accessible. In current psychological research, 'few phenomena are easier to demonstrate and harder to explain than the so-called anchor-ing effect, a biased estimate toward an arbitrary value considered by judges before making a numerical estimate (Jacowitz & Kahneman, 1995). In one of the best known and most typical anchoring studies I (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), research par-