First Encounter with the IAT
As psychology majors or minors, I’m pretty sure many of us has been exposed to the idea of Implicit Association Test, a test that measures the subjects response time to a certain stimulus. This test is often used to assess variables like racist views, with the theory behind it being that your mind is more readily accepting of words and images that you subconsciously associate together (e.g. the word “bad” and a image of an African-American). Now, it is widely used in social psychology research and as well as a bit in cognitive, clinical, and developmental psychology research. Some controversy still surrounds this theory.
Although I’ve heard much about such tests, I had never had the pleasure of participating in one. To my delight, however, I was able to take this test the other day when I had to participate in a study for extra credits. I cannot go into details because the study was explicitly designed to hide the actual hypothesis so that the participants are not biased. I find that it might be a bad idea to publically expose the true hypothesis out here in the eyes of potential other subjects of this study. But in essence, this test was measuring the subject’s response time to flashing images and words. Unfortunately I was unable to discover the result, but I believe I can still share my experience on here.
After initiating my test, I had to go through many shifting images and choosing words. My main thought the whole time was: “what a tedious process”. Indeed it was very tedious, considering that it was quite long with three consecutive sessions with 10 second breaks in between, totaling to maybe around 10–15minutes. It’s quite hard without concentrate intensively, with only few seconds to spare between each image. The images included many control stimuli such as images of random objects (e.g. clocks), but every now and then it will pose a picture of, say, a white women (who was also relatively attractive-looking). Without the knowing the actual hypothesis, to me personally it seemed like a good test to measure your implicit thoughts. I don’t know what I was fantasizing about this test, but it turned out to be quite bland, more so than I expected.
This leads to my question of how valid is this test? A quick Google search told me that the test has good construct validity. Some researchers argue that, although it provides good strength of association, it may just be measuring a different construct such as cultural knowledge. This should be solved with further researching and testing the validity. In terms of predictive validity, IAT showed that it has strength in more socially sensitive context, which seems natural. All this considered, the debate seems to still linger on, with psychology, in the end, being relatively a new scientific field of study.
Thus concluded my experience with the IAT. I’d like to summarize it as a very interactive method that requires a lot of concentration, and in the end, a bit bland (much like many other tests). I can see this test being at good use for social psychology, and I hope the validity improves as further research is done.
