Racism IAT

Background

The Implicit Association Task (IAT) is a widely used measure of the strength of automatic, internal concept associations. It was pioneered by Anthony Greenwald and colleagues in 1998 First used as a tool to investigate implicit social biases such as racial stereotypes, not easily revealed with explicit self-report measures like questionnaires, the IAT paradigm soon found its way into other areas of human behavior such as consumer research and health related domains.

The 'Race IAT' was one of the first and most influential variants of the IAT paradigm. After validating the IAT procedure with generic, socially non-threating categories such as "Flowers" and "Insects", Greenwald and colleagues moved on to study social biases that people may either believe they do not have or would not feel comfortable admitting to having if directly asked. Racial stereotypes were obvious contenders, in particular stereotypes regarding the Black community in the US.

Early 'Race' IATs tested people's automatic associations between names strongly associated with Black Americans (e.g. "Lamar") and White Americans (e.g. "Ian"). Later Race IAT's substituted actual black and white face images of Black and White Americans for the names. Participants were asked to rapidly sort "Black" and "White" faces, together with positive and negative words, into the two categories GOOD and BAD. The task was done once with sorting positive words and "White" faces into the GOOD category (and negative words and "Black" faces into the BAD one) and a second time with pairing the "Black" faces with the positive words instead. To this day, results overwhelmingly show that most participants are faster to sort the stimuli when "White" Faces (or "White" Names) are paired with the positive words than the opposite pairings: about 65% of participants show such a "pro-White" bias and only 19% show little to no bias. Results for only Black participants are much more evenly split. Only about a third of Black participants show a "pro-Black" bias.

It is important to note that while the IAT is designed to measure the strength of automatic associations and thus may reveal our brain's unfiltered, subconcious (current) preferences, it cannot diagnose "racism" nor real-world discriminatory behavior.

Task Procedure

Participants are asked to categorize positive and negative words (e.g. "Pleasure"; "Horrible") and "Black" and "White" face images into predetermined categories via keystroke presses. The basic task is to press the left key (E) if an item (e.g. "Pleasure") belongs to the category presented on the left (e.g. "GOOD") and to press the right key (I) if the word (e.g. "Horrible") belongs to the category ("BAD") presented on the right. The items are presented one-by-one, and participants are asked to respond as quickly as possible without making too many mistakes. If a mistake is made, error feedback is provided in the form of a red 'X' and the response has to be corrected.

For practice, participants sort items into the target categories "Black American vs. White American" and attribute categories "GOOD vs. BAD", separately. For the test, participants are asked to sort categories into the paired/combined categories (e.g. "GOOD or WHITE AMERICAN" on the left vs. "BAD OR BLACK AMERICAN" on the right). Pairings are reversed for a second test (e.g. "GOOD OR BLACK AMERICAN" on the left vs. "BAD or WHITE AMERICAN" on the right). Each test block is separated into a short (20 trial) and a longer (40 trial) phase. Separate d-scores are calculated for both, and their unweighted mean is taken as the overall d-score. Positive d-scores suggest a preferential "White" bias, negative d-scores suggest a preferential "Black" bias.

What it Measures

The IAT measures the strength of subconscious links between different mental concepts

Psychological domains

• Implicit Cognition: Cognitive Processes not under conscious control
• Social Cognition: People's thoughts and perceptions of themselves and others in the social world
• Social Stereotypes: Generalized beliefs or expectations about the characteristics of members of a specific social group

Main Performance Metrics

• d-score: Measure of strength between associated concepts

Psychiatric Conditions

The Race IAT is not used for research with any specific patient group. Other IAT measures are used for research with the following patient groups:

• Suicide
• Depression
• Self-harm
• Eating Disorders

References

Search Google Scholar for peer-reviewed, published research using the Inquisit Racism IAT.

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Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. K. L. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.