Testing the Validity of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure and the Implicit Association Test: Measuring Attitudes Toward Dublin and Country Life in Ireland

Abstract

The current study aimed to test the validity of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), as compared to the Implicit Association Test (IAT), by assessing the attitudes of Dublin dwellers and rural dwellers toward Dublin and country life. Discrimination between the two groups for the IAT was marginally significant. The IRAP discriminated significantly between the two groups based on an interaction effect, which showed that rural dwellers had a strong bias toward country life but Dublin dwellers did not show the same bias toward Dublin life. The IRAP data correlated moderately with the explicit measures, but the IAT did not. The findings support the IRAP as a potentially useful measure of implicit attitudes. The currently most popular and well-researched measure of so-called implicit attitudes is the Implicit Association Test, or IAT (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). The core assumption underpinning the method is that individuals should respond quickly when asked to emit a similar response for two concepts that are closely associated in memory, but should respond more slowly when the two concepts are less closely associated. The first IAT study by Greenwald et al. (1998) asked participants in one task to categorize the names of flowers with positive words and the names of insects with negative words, but in a second task these categorizations were reversed (flowers–negative and insects–positive). The predicted IAT effect was observed: The participants responded faster on flower–positive and