Using the implicit association test to measure self-esteem and self-concept

“…years have witnessed the development of measures of implicit attitudes, such as the Implicit Association Test (Cunningham, Preacher, & Banaji, 2001; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998; Karpinski & Hilton, 2001; Rudman, 2004), which bypass many of the problems associated…”

“In adult subjects, IAT measures of self-esteem have been found to correlate only weakly with self-report measures of self-esteem (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Rudolph, Schröder-Abé, Schütz, Gregg, & Sedikides, 2008).”

“The original IAT is limited to assessing only relative preferences of two objects (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000).”

“The IAT has been used to investigate implicit attitudes towards a wide variety of topics, including age prejudices (e.g. Hummert et al., 2002), smoking (e.g. De Houwer et al., 2006), and self-esteem (e.g. Greenwald and Farnham, 2000).”

“Following Greenwald and Farnham (2000), for the Self-IAT, me and not me were the generic labels used.”

“schemas, as they are hypothesized to be less affected by social desirability biases and introspection deficits (Greenwald and Farnham 2000).”

“In Experiment 2, the dependent measure was based on the well-documented Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Greenwald, Mc- Ghee, & Schwartz, 1998).”

“This manipulation (inspired by research on the IAT, e.g., Greenwald & Farnham, 2000 ) was expected to activate our preference-based and satiation-based construals of choice with minimal awareness.”

“On the basis of past experience, we unconsciously make implicit associations between concepts that eventually become assumptions which guide our daily decision-making (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000).”

“…order and by the finding that test-retest reliability of IATs is typically lower than internal consistency (e.g., Asendorpf, Banse, & Mücke, 2002; Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001; Egloff & Schmuckle, 2002; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Steffens & Buchner, 2003).”

“Social cognition literature identifies several kinds of implicit associations, such as implicit attitudes (e.g., Greenwald et al. 1998), implicit stereotypes (Greenwald et al. 2003), and implicit self-concept (Greenwald and Farnham 2000).”

“In particular, research has pointed to the utility of reaction-timebased measures, such as implicit association tasks (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Legault et al., 2007; Weinstein, Ryan, et al., 2012), and other indirect and projective assessments (e.g., Baumann, Kaschel, & Kuhl, 2005).”

“We thus computed IAT scores by dividing the differences between the average response latencies of Blocks 3 and 4, and those of Blocks 6 and 7, by the standard deviation of all latencies in the blocks (D measure: Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003).”

“The IAT is one of the most frequently used implicit tests to measure the strength of automatic concept-attribute associations, that may underlie specific aspects of personality (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Schnabel, Asendorpf, & Greenwald, 2008), including RS (LaBouff et al., 2010).”

“7%, which exceed the recommended value of 80% (Enock 2015; Greenwald and Farnham 2000).”

“To maintain comparable levels of exposure and habituation, we selected three positive and three negative words with similar word-frequency norms (Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995) from lists of good and bad words used for other wordsorting tasks (Greenwald et al., 1998). We chose eight additional positive and eig…”

“It has been used to measure implicit self-concept [17, 34] and dysfunctional cognitive schemata, especially in anxiety disorders [41].”

“Although IAT scores are not immune to faking, there is substantial evidence concerning psychometric properties of IAT measures (Egloff & Schmukle, 2002; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Greenwald & Nosek, 2001; Lane et al., 2007; Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007).”

“The IAT has been used to measure implicit attitudes, which are conceived of as associations involving objects and evaluative attributes (Cunningham, Preacher, & Banaji, 2001; Marsh, Johnson, & Lori, 2001; McConnell & Leibold, 2001; Rudman & Kilianski, 2000), implicit stereotypes (Greenwald et al., 1998), implicit self…”

“As the IAT is a measure that uses reaction times to determine relative strength of associations (Greenwald et al., 1998; Greenwald and Farnham, 2000) between the selfconcept and the attribute category, an equivalent comparison category for shame was required.”

“…Publishing Social Psychology 2011; Vol. 42(4):300–313 The selection of targets and attributes is, of course, critical to interpreting any effects that are elicited (e.g., Bluemke & Friese, 2006; Steffens & Plewe, 2001; for a review of this and other procedural issues pertaining to the use of…”

“For example, Greenwald and Farnham (2000) showed that the IAT was reliably associated with reactions to experimentally induced successes and failures.”

“Recent research has demonstrated that the self can be measured at both an explicit and implicit level with implicit self-concepts reflecting the various types of information that we associate with the self in memory ( Greenwald & Farnham, 2000 ).”

“Karpinski (2004) has argued that because of the bipolar nature of the IAT (self vs. other), the IAT measures not only how we perceive ourselves, but also how we perceive others. For this reason, the IAT should not be regarded a pure measure of selfesteem. In his article Karpinski suggests that the other category may n…”

“Three of the most promising of these measures assess implicit self-esteem by determining the ease with which individuals are able to pair pleasant words with the self (i.e., Implicit Association Test; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000), how quickly positive words come to mind following exposure to a self-relevant prime (i.e.,…”

“Despite attempts to interpret them as evidence of discriminant validity (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000), these correlations indicate considerable lack of convergent validity, and question the overall construct validity of self-esteem IAT.”

“In one study they had participants complete an implicit association test (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000) to assess their implicit self-esteem and then complete the Rosenberg (1965) inventory to assess their explicit self-esteem.”

“On one hand, initial studies suggested that implicit measures had weak to null associations with conventional explicit self-esteem measures, such as Rosenberg’s (1965) inventory (e.g., Bosson et al., 2000; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000).”

“Feeling-thermometers are commonly used in the IAT literature; they possess the advantage of being very brief yet nevertheless correlate to a high degree with questionnaires such as the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (.68 < r < .74; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Karpinski, 2004).”

“Greenwald and Farnham (2000) illustrated the IAT with a thought experiment, as follows: Imagine sorting a standard deck of 52 playing cards, containing 13 cards in each of the four suits of clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades.”

“[Our sample size was in line with power considerations based on Greenwald and Farnham’s (2000) finding of r= .”

“Both Greenwald and Farnham (2000) and Koboyashi and Greenwald (2003) suggested that an IAT variant, the Go/No-Go Association Task (GNAT; Nosek & Banaji, 2001)—which assesses association strength between two target categories, or between a target category and the two attribute dimension poles, independent of contrastin…”

“In an effort to bypass conscious deliberation and tap into more automatic processes, implicit measures of self-esteem such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald and Farnham, 2000) and the Name-Letter Test (Koole and Pelham, 2003) have been developed.”

“Correlations between measures of explicit and implicit self-esteem are positive but low ( Greenwald & Farnham, 2000 ), and the two can be considered separate constructs (Jordan, Spencer & Zanna, 2003).”

“Developed in the field of attitude research, the IAT was adapted to measure personality traits such as self-esteem (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000), shyness (Asendorpf, Banse, & Mücke, 2002), and anxiety (Egloff & Schmukle, 2002).”

“The difference in speed while performing these tasks is computed, and the extent to which the former task takes less time is indicative of relatively positive implicit selfesteem (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000).”

“To the extent that the self is associated with positive valence (Cvencek et al., 2016; Sedikides, Gaertner, & Cai, 2015; see also Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Koole, Dijksterhuis, & Van Knippenberg, 2001), objects of positive or negative valence have pre-existing levels of self-object congruity or…”

“Both conceptualisations tend to be measured via self-report (Greenwald and Farnham 2000).”

“Because the IAT is based on comparisons between concepts, it can only measure the association of attributes of one concept relative to another (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000).”

“Several reports suggest that basic evaluative processes are performed fast and automatically (i.e., [81-83]), suggesting that these effects occur prior to awareness attitude information processing (i.e., [3,84, 85 ]).”

“Similarly on implicit measures of gender self-concept, men and women show even stronger gender differences, sometimes as much as three times the difference they show on explicit measures (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000).”

“Greenwald and Farnham (2000) successfully adapted the IAT to derive meaningful indexes of implicit self-esteem as well as implicit masculinity–femininity.”

“More recently, the IAT has also been used to measure personal attributes, such as implicit self-esteem (Greenwald and Farnham, 2000), humility (Rowatt et al., 2006) and anxiety responses of phobics to spiders and snakes (Teachman et al., 2001).”

“…the nominal features for other contrasts that are often used in the IAT, like insects versus flowers (Greenwald et al., 1998), self versus other (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Rothermund & Wentura, 2004), or other category contrasts that are not bipolar (e.g., alcohol vs. sodas, Wiers, van…”

“In addition, H2D predicted that for male participants, there would be no or low correlation between implicit and explicit measures of gender bias (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000).”

“…self-esteem from performance in the relevant domain, it has been demonstrated that members of negatively stereotyped groups often have levels of global self-esteem that are as high, or even higher than, their positively stereotyped counterparts (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Twenge & Crocker, 2002).”

“…stereotypes of social constructs including race (ecomorphological group) and gender (Banaji & Greenwald, 1995; Banaji & Hardin, 1996; Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Greenwald et al., 1998, 2002).”

“2 We administered a masculine-feminine self-concept implicit association test (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000) but did not find effects of condition on men’s implicit self-concept, suggesting that these identity strategies may operate on the explicit rather than implicit level.”

“Not me as category labels in self–concept or self– esteem IATs, in place of using self vs. other (see Greenwald & Farnham, 2000) .”

“The Implicit Association Test (IAT) (Banaji and Greenwald 2013; Greenwald and Farnham 2000; Greenwald et al.”

“As shown previously, the ease of making judgments when the self and pleasant categories are combined under one response rule can be used as a measure of implicit self-esteem (Greenwald and Farnham, 2000).”

“The two most frequently used measures are the IAT (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000) and a measure of how much individuals like the letters in their own names (i.e., the NLT; Jones, Pelham, Mirenberg, & Hetts, 2002).”