A public versus private administration of the implicit association test

Abstract

This research includes two experiments that examined (a) whether the assessment situation in which individuals complete an implicit measure of bias alters their responses and (b) whether the hypothesized effect of the assessment situation on implicitly assessed bias reflects socially desirable responding. Participants in Experiment 1 (N ¼ 151) completed an IAT measuring bias toward homosexuality in either a public or a private assessment situation. Consistent with studies of explicitly assessed attitudes, implicitly assessed bias toward homosexuality was significantly lower when assessed in a public versus a private assessment situation. Participants in Experiment 2 (N ¼ 102) completed an IAT measuring bias toward homosexuality in a public assessment situation under a bogus pipeline or no-bogus pipeline condition. Results indicated that participants’ implicitly assessed bias did not significantly differ across these conditions. The authors discuss these findings in terms of possible automatic processes affecting the malleability of implicitly assessed attitudes. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Implicit measures of attitudes are a revolutionary component of research on prejudice because they have the potential to assess attitudes that people are unwilling or unable to consciously report (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz (1998) provided a dramatic illustration of this point when they showed that White participants endorsed positive or neutral attitudes toward AfricanAmericans on an explicit measure but exhibited negative attitudes toward African-Americans on an implicit measure. These results have subsequently been replicated (Ottoway, Hayden, & Oakes; 2001), and have been extended to include attitudes toward a variety of social groups such as Hispanics (Ottoway et al., 2001), Turks (Neumann & Seibt, 2001), elderly people (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002), and homosexuals (Banse, Seise, & Zerbes, 2001; Steffens & Buchner, 2003).