Plausible assumptions, questionable assumptions and post hoc rationalizations: Will the real IAT, please stand up?

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Abstract

In a recent article, we described psychometric limitations to the Implicit Association Test (IAT). These limitations restrict the utility of this measure and render it problematic for testing many psychological theories that posit a causal role for implicit attitudes. Past failures to recognize this may have promoted faulty conclusions in the literature. In a critique of our article, Nosek and Sriram rejected our entire analysis. They asserted that our original article was based on faulty assumptions and argued that the IAT performs nicely when these assumptions are replaced by other, more plausible assumptions. We show that these plausible assumptions have all the hallmarks of post hoc rationalizations. They make little theoretical sense, are buttressed by deceptive statistical practices, contradict statements these same researchers have made in the past and do little to advance research and theory on implicit attitudes. We close by considering the vigor with which IAT researchers have dismissed meaningful criticisms of their measure.

Section snippets

Theory testing

Consider some psychological theories that might be of interest to a psychologist. Fig. 1 presents examples using the traditional schematic for representing causal models. The top panel presents the causal model that would be tested by a researcher who wants to predict college students’ identification with math from their attitudes towards math and arts. Based on the path coefficients that this researcher has hypothesized, math identification should be predicted from the attitude towards math,

An empirical evaluation

We now present data that explores issues central to Nosek and Sriram’s critique. In a study using a convenience sample of 132 male and female college students, we administered an attitude inventory that measured two attitudes that a consumer psychologist might target with an IAT task. These were (1) attitudes towards apples and (2) attitudes towards oranges. The attitude towards apples was measured with three (11-point) items and the attitude towards oranges was measured with three separate

Reverse-scored IAT indicators: A justified assumption

In the psychometric model we tested for the IAT in our original article, we noted that the two measured IAT response latencies (one for the compatible task and the other for the incompatible task) should be negatively correlated with one another, once systematic confounds due to general processing speed are removed. Accordingly, as one’s true preference for whites relative to blacks increases, (1) response latencies for the compatible task of the black-white IAT (pairing whites with positive

Distractions

At the risk of being drawn into nonproductive exchanges, we feel we should respond to two of the false and misleading statements Nosek and Sriram made concerning our original analyses. Each of these statements represents a distraction that might draw readers’ attention away from the more fundamental intellectual differences between us.

Distraction 1: The IAT Is Not Double-Barreled. In our original article, we observed that the IAT question format is double-barreled. Specifically, we stated that

Closing thoughts

We have now published three critiques of the IAT (Blanton and Jaccard, 2006a, Blanton and Jaccard, 2006b; Blanton et al., 2006), but each of these papers has been categorically rejected by IAT researchers (Greenwald et al., 2006, Greenwald, Rudman et al., 2006, Nosek and Sriram, 2007). Although we are satisfied with how we have defended our work (Blanton and Jaccard, 2006c, Blanton and Jaccard, 2006d, Jaccard and Blanton, 2006), we cannot help but notice that we have had little influence on how

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