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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
1998,
Vol. 74, No. 6, 1464-1480Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
OO22-3514/98/S3.0O
Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition:
The Implicit Association Test
Anthony G. Greenwald, Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K. Schwartz
University of Washington
An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an
attribute. The 2 concepts appear in a 2-choice task (e.g., flower vs. insect names), and the attribute
in a 2nd task (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant words for an evaluation attribute). When instructions
oblige highly associated categories (e.g., flower + pleasant) to share a response key, performance
is faster than when less associated categories (e.g., insect + pleasant) share a key. This performance
difference implicitly measures differential association of the 2 concepts with the attribute. In 3
experiments, the IAT was sensitive to (a) near-universal evaluative differences (e.g., flower vs.
insect),
(b) expected individual differences in evaluative associations (Japanese + pleasant vs.
Korean + pleasant for Japanese vs. Korean subjects), and (c) consciously disavowed evaluative
differences (Black + pleasant vs. White + pleasant for self-described unprejudiced White subjects).
Consider a thought experiment. \bu are shown a series of
male and female faces, to which you are to respond as rapidly
as possible by saying "hello" if the face is male and "goodbye"
if it is female. For a second task, you are shown a series of
male and female names, to which you are to respond rapidly
with ' 'hello'' for male names and ' 'goodbye'' for female names.
These discriminations are both designed to be easy—the faces
and names are unambiguously male or female. For a final task
you are asked to perform both of these discriminations alter-
nately. That is, you are shown a series of alternating faces and
names, and you are to say "hello" if the face or name is male
and "goodbye" if the face or name is female. If you guess that
this combined task will be easy, you are correct.
Now imagine a small variation of the thought experiment.
The first discrimination is the same ("hello" to male faces,
' 'goodbye'' to female faces), but the second is reversed (' 'good-
bye"
to male names, "hello" to female names). As with the
first experiment, each of these tasks, by
itself,
is easy. However,
when you contemplate mixing the two tasks ("hello" to male
face or female name and "goodbye" to female face or male
name),
you may suspect that this new combined task will be
difficult. Unless you wish to make many errors, you will have
to respond considerably more slowly than in the previous
experiment.
The expected difficulty of the experiment with the reversed
Anthony G. Greenwald, Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K.
Schwartz, Department of Psychology, University of Washington.
This research was partially supported by Grant SBR-9422242 from
the National Science Foundation and Grant MH 41328 from the National
Institute of Mental Health. For comments on a draft of this article, the
authors thank Mahzarin Banaji, Shelly Farnham, Laurie Rudman, and
Yuichi Shoda.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to An-
thony G. Greenwald, Department of Psychology, Box 351525, University
of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-1525. Electronic mail may
be sent to agg@u.washington.edu.
second discrimination follows from the existence of strong asso-
ciations of male names to male faces and female names to female
faces.
The attempt to map the same two responses ("hello"
and ' 'goodbye'') in opposite ways onto the two gender contrasts
is resisted by well-established associations that link the face
and name domains. The (assumed) performance difference be-
tween the two versions of the combined task indeed measures
the strength of gender-based associations between the face and
name domains. This pair of thought experiments provides the
model for a method, the implicit association test (IAT), that
is potentially useful for diagnosing a wide range of socially
significant associative structures. The present research sought
specifically to appraise the IAT method's usefulness for measur-
ing evaluative associations that underlie implicit attitudes
(Greenwald & Banaji, 1995).
Measuring Implicit Attitudes
Implicit attitudes are manifest as actions or judgments that
are under the control of automatically activated evaluation, with-
out the performer's awareness of that causation (Greenwald &
Banaji, 1995, pp. 6-8).' The IAT procedure seeks to measure
implicit attitudes by measuring their underlying automatic evalu-
ation. The IAT is therefore similar in intent to cognitive priming
procedures for measuring automatic affect or attitude (e.g.,
Bargh, Chaiken, Govender, & Pratto, 1992; Fazio, Sanbonmatsu,
Powell, & Kardes, 1986; Fazio, 1993; Greenwald, Klinger, &
Liu, 1989; Perdue, Dovidio, Gurtman, & Tyler, 1990; Perdue &
Gurtman, 1990).2
1 Greenwald and Banaji (1995) defined implicit attitudes as "intro-
spectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experi-
ence that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action
toward social objects" (p. 8).
2 A few recent studies have indicated that priming measures may be
sensitive enough to serve as measures of individual differences in the
strength of automatic attitudinal evaluation (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1995;
Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995). At the same time, other
studies have indicated that priming is relatively unaffected by variations
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