Cm. Brendl et al., How do indirect measures of evaluation work? Evaluating the inference of prejudice in the implicit association test, J PERS SOC, 81(5), 2001, pp. 760-773
There has been significant interest in indirect measures of attitudes like
the Implicit Association Test (IAT), presumably because of the possibility
of uncovering implicit prejudices. The authors derived a set of qualitative
predictions for people's performance in the IAT on the basis of random wal
k models. These were supported in 3 experiments comparing clearly positive
or negative categories to nonwords. They also provided evidence that partic
ipants shift their response criterion when doing the IAT. Because of these
criterion shifts, a response pattern in the IAT can have multiple causes. T
hus, it is not possible to infer a single cause (such as prejudice) from IA
T results. A surprising additional result was that nonwords were treated as
though they were evaluated more negatively than obviously negative items l
ike insects, suggesting that low familiarity items may generate the pattern
of data previously interpreted as evidence for implicit prejudice.