Relations between implicit and explicit measures of personality - prospects of Implicit Association Test (IAT) in assessment of basic personality traits

Abstract

Introduction. The core idea behind the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is to obtain information that are not the result of controlled processes. Therefore, it is considered a technique with the potential to overcome some disadvantages of explicit measures, such as socially desirable responding. IAT consists of a task of double categorization whereby the respondents have to sort the stimuli belonging to superordinated categories. Study objective. The main objective of the study was to investigate the convergent and discriminative validity of IAT in the assessment of basic personality traits. Method. To investigate the relations between the implicit and explicit measures, Implicit Association Tests, several self-report measures, ratings by close others, and measures of cognitive abilities were administered to a sample of 224 university students at Belgrade University. Ratings by experts and linguistic measures were collected from a subsample of 99 subjects. The respondents completed the personality IAT, NEO-PIR and DELTA10 (S and R form), a short scale of attributes (DOCEAN), a short questionnaire for the assessment of relevant moderator variables, KOG9 battery test for the assessment of intellectual abilities, and self-assessment of intellectual abilities. In addition, they were observed by experts in structured interviews, in which linguistic parameters were collected through an automatic text analysis (LIWC). Results. The correlations between the self-reported and IAT Neuroticism (0.17) and Extraversion (0.16) were found to be small but significant (p<0.05). However, none of the paths from the personality IAT to the corresponding latent traits in SEM Correlated-Traits-Correlated-Uniqueness-MTMM-Model was significant. The model had the excellent fit: c2=338.18, p=0.00; RMSEA=0.042 (90% CI RMSEA 0.031- 0.053), SRMR=0.066 and CFI=0.96. The MTMM analyses on a subsample of 99 respondents, from which behavioural measures were collected, demonstrated relations iv between IAT and the parameters collected with automatic text analysis (LIWC). Subsequent analyses demonstrated a strong divergence between implicit and explicit method factors. Conclusion. Study has shown that the personality IAT measures have little in common with personality traits measured by the traditional self-report inventories or rating scales. However, MTMM analysis provides evidence about the predictive validity of IAT in spontaneous verbal behaviour.