Abstract
The current study shows that people's ability to inhibit implicit associations that run counter to their explicit views varies in a circadian pattern. The presence of this rhythmic variation suggests the involvement of a biological process in regulating automatic associations—specifically, with the current data, associations that form undesirable social biases. In 1998, Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz introduced the Implicit Association Test as a means of measuring individual differences in implicit cognition. The IAT is a powerful tool that has become widely used. Perhaps most visibly, studies employing the IAT demonstrate that people generally hold implicit biases against social groups, which often conflict with their explicitly held views. The IAT engages inhibitory processes similar to those inherent in self-control tasks. Because the latter processes are known to be resource-limited, we considered whether IAT scores might likewise be resource dependent. Analyzing IAT performance from over a million participants across all times of day, we found a clear circadian pattern in scores. This finding suggests that the IAT measures not only the strength of implicit associations, but also the effect of variations in the physiological resources available to inhibit their undesirable influences on explicit behavior.
Highlights
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an indirect measure of conceptual associations in which items from each of four categories are mapped to one of two responses [1]
The pattern of change between midnight and 6 AM is less clear, but because a shared, standard sleep/wake cycle is a central assumption of the analysis, participants who are awake and taking an IAT during these times are quite likely not entrained by the same circadian clocks as the other participants, and should be expected to have a high degree of variability in the phase of their circadian rhythms and a pattern of change in IAT scores that is less clear
Because implicit attitudes result from automatic associations that are formed over the lifetime, they ought to be relatively stable and unchanging [39], and because of the huge number of participants included in this study, one might expect that the group means ought to be fairly stable regardless
Summary
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an indirect measure of conceptual associations in which items from each of four categories are mapped to one of two responses (e.g., left vs. right key press) [1]. Attitude IATs assess the strength of association between concept pairs (e.g., snakes vs dogs) and valence (e.g., unpleasant vs pleasant) by comparing response times in two conditions. In the ‘compatible’ condition (e.g., unpleasant/snakes vs pleasant/dogs) associated categories share a common response and participants respond quickly and accurately. In the ‘incompatible’ condition (e.g., unpleasant/dogs vs pleasant/snakes) participants respond more slowly and make more errors. The logic of the IAT is that for a person with a stronger automatic association there will be a higher degree of conflict in the incompatible condition, and as a result reaction times (RTs) will be greater relative to a person with a weaker automatic association. By measuring these underlying automatic evaluations, the IAT is measuring the resulting implicit attitudes, and should be predictive of overt behavior
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