La. Rudman et al., Measuring the automatic components of prejudice: Flexibility and generality of the Implicit Association Test, SOC COGN, 17(4), 1999, pp. 437-465
The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) pr
ovides a flexible measure of the automatic associations underlying implicit
prejudice. Results of three experiments showed strong evidence of implicit
prejudices based on religious ethnicity (Jewish vs. Christian), age (young
vs. old), and nationality (American vs. Soviet). Subjects responded more r
apidly to tasks that obliged association of ingroup tokens to pleasant attr
ibutes and outgroup tokens to unpleasant attributes than to ones that oblig
ed the complementary associations. In addition, the findings of three exper
iments were consistent with the hypothesis that IAT effects are independent
of self-reported stimulus familiarity differences. These results support t
he construct validity and the generality of the IAT method in implicit prej
udice research.