Health of the Implicit Association Test at age 3

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• The Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed in 1998, is widely used to assess implicit attitudes and automatic associations.
• While some criticisms exist, a growing body of evidence supports the IAT's validity.
• This special issue presents new research contributing to the understanding of IAT's psychometric properties.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the convergent and discriminant validity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT).
• To examine the relationship between IAT-derived measures of attitudes and explicit self-report measures.
• To synthesize recent evidence on the IAT's utility in psychological research.

Main Methods:

• Review of existing literature on the Implicit Association Test (IAT).
• Inclusion of new empirical studies presented in this special issue.
• Analysis of correlations between IAT measures and explicit self-report measures.

Main Results:

• Substantial evidence supports the convergent and discriminant validity of the IAT.
• IAT attitude measures frequently show weak correlations with explicit self-report measures of the same constructs.
• New evidence presented in this issue further corroborates the IAT's validity.

Conclusions:

• The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a valuable tool for measuring implicit associations.
• IAT measures assess psychological constructs that are often distinct from those measured by self-report.
• Continued research supports the IAT's role in understanding automatic cognitive processes.