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Study Supports Validity of Implicit Association Test

In the decade since the Implicit Association Test was introduced, its most surprising and controversial finding is its indication that about 70% of those who took a version of the test that measures racial attitudes have an unconscious, or implicit, preference for white people compared with blacks. This contrasts with figures generally under 20% for self report, or survey, measures of race bias.
 
A new study validates those findings, showing that the Implicit Association Test, a psychological tool, has validity in predicting behavior and, in particular, that it has significantly greater validity than self-reports in the socially sensitive topics of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age.
 
The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is an overview and analysis of 122 published and unpublished reports of 184 different research studies. In this analysis, 85% of the studies also included self-reporting measures of the type generally used in surveys. This allowed the researchers, headed by University of Washington psychology professor Anthony Greenwald, PhD, to compare the test’s success in predicting social behavior and judgment with the success of self-reports.
 
“In socially sensitive areas, especially black-white interracial behavior, the test had significantly greater predictive value than self-reports. This finding establishes the Implicit Association Test’s value in research to understand the roots of race and other discrimination,” says Greenwald. “What was especially surprising was how ineffective standard self-report measurers were in the areas in which the test measures have been of greatest interest: predicting interracial behavior.”
 
The research looked at studies covering nine different areas – consumer preference, black-white interracial behavior, personality differences, clinical phenomena, alcohol and drug use, non-racial intergroup behavior, gender and sexual orientation, close relationships and political preferences.
 
— Source: University of Washington