How robust is the IAT? Measuring and manipulating implicit attitudes of East- and West-Germans

We investigated consequences of priming East-West-German related self-knowl edge for the strength of implicit, ingroup-directed positive evaluations am ong East- and West-Germans. Based on previous studies we predicted opposite effects of self-knowledge priming for East- and West-Germans. Since in gen eral the East-German stereotype is regarded as more negative than the West- German one, bringing to mind East-West-related self-knowledge (relative to neutral priming) was expected to attenuate ingroup favoritism for East-Germ ans, but to increase it for West-Germans. After having fulfilled the primin g tasks, participants worked on an IAT-version in which the to be classifie d stimuli were East- or West-German city names (dimension 1) and positive o r negative adjectives (dimension 2). Results of Experiment 1 showed (a) tha t East- and West-German students implicitly evaluated their ingroups as mor e positive than the outgroups and (b) confirmed the predictions of the prim ing influence. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with more representat ive samples from East- and West-Germany. The results are discussed with reg ard to underlying processes of implicit attitudes in intergroup contexts.