Response Biases on the IRAP for Adults and Adolescents with Respect to Smokers and Nonsmokers: The Impact of Parental Smoking Status

Abstract

The current research aimed to examine the implicit biases of smokers and nonsmokers to others who did or did not smoke. Study 1 presented adult smokers and nonsmokers with an Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) that assessed bias toward or against smokers and nonsmokers. Study 2 replicated this with adolescent smokers and nonsmokers. Both studies also presented self-report measures. Both adult and adolescent smokers produced IRAP effects that indicated prosmoker biases; nonsmokers’ biases were relatively neutral. Trends in the data from Studies 1 and 2 led to a post hoc analysis of the nonsmoker data to investigate the potential impact of parental smoking status on nonsmokers’ biases. Both the IRAP and self-report measures data suggested that parental smoking status increased positivity in attitudes toward smokers among nonsmokers. Hierarchical logistic regression analyses indicated that the IRAP data in Study 1, but not Study 2, predicted smoking status above and beyond the self-report measures. The post hoc analyses showed a similar trend. The consistency of the findings with the only existing IRAP study of attitudes toward smokers, as well as with the broader literature, supports the view that response biases toward smokers may not change fundamentally from adolescence to adulthood, and that parental smoking status may having a moderating influence on these biases.