Workshop (11.05.2022): Implicit self-concept of personality and Implicit Association Tests
Early bird price (until April 15th, 2021): 25€ Late price (until May 10th, 2021): 35€
Abstract:
Limits to introspection, that is, the difficulty to gain access into people’s inner experiences, have fascinated researchers and laypeople alike. If people try to fake their answers or to respond in a socially desirable way, this poses a problem for psychological research that draws on explicit (i.e., self-report) measures. Researchers have therefore tried to design alternative measures that do not rely on people’s verbal report, and implicit measures have been a significant improvement in this respect. The development of implicit measures, such as the widely used Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) facilitated immense research activity across many fields of psychology and beyond. Implicit measures differ from traditional explicit measures in that they do not require a self-report (e.g., responding to an item such as “On the whole, I am satisfied with myself”). Rather, evaluations derived from these measures are based on participants’ performance (e.g., the response speed with which one is able to respond to positive, negative, self-describing, and non-self-describing stimuli in a computerized categorization task). In this half-day course, we will focus on the IAT as the most popular implicit measure and address three parts: The first part is devoted to definitional issues and dual-process theories as an important theoretical rationale. In the second part, we elaborate on essential design characteristics of IAT procedures and discuss issues related to reliability, fakeability, and validity as important quality criteria of IATs. In the final part, we discuss limitations related to the IAT and offer best practice tips for how to address them.
