A Structural and Process Analysis of the Implicit Association Test

Abstract

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.