Skin Tone 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 'Skin Tone IAT' is a specialized IAT designed to measure unconscious attitudes toward different skin colors, designed by Project Implicit, the non-profit research platform dedicated to managing the growing body of international IAT research and public education efforts. The Skintone IAT is a variant of the influential 'Race IAT' with the crucial difference that it focuses exclusively on colorism (the shade of skin), while the Race IAT focuses on racial categorization (stereotypes and ethnic identity). For example, the images used for the Skin Tone IAT for light and dark skinned people only differ in the color of their skin.

Project Implicit data collected by Brian Nosek and colleagues in 2007 revealed that roughly 2/3 of online participants across self-reported ethnic and racial groups exhibited an automatic implicit preference for lighter skin tones.

Task Procedure

Participants are asked to categorize positive and negative words (e.g. "Pleasure"; "Horrible") and illustrations of light and dark skinned faces 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 "Light Skinned vs. Dark Skinned" (Note: presented as images; not as words) 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 Light Skinned" on the left vs. "BAD OR Dark Skinned" on the right). Pairings are reversed for a second test (e.g. "GOOD OR Dark Skinned" on the left vs. "BAD or Light Skinned" 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 "light skin" bias, negative d-scores suggest a preferential "dark skin" bias.

What it Measures

The IAT measures the strength of subconscious links between different mental concepts; the Skin Tone IAT specifically measures bias towards skin color.

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 Skin Tone 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 Skin Tone IAT.

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Fitzsimmons, K A (2009). The Existence of Implicit Racial Bias in Nursing Faculty. Doctoral Dissertation.