Implicit Association Test Influencing Factors Research

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one of the most important indirect measures applied in implicit social cognition. Being unique in nature and having been in use for only 5 years, the IAT procedure itself needs more attention in order to be understood in a more comprehensive way.The present thesis is dedicated at this aim. In the theory section, the major indirect measures are summarized, together with a brief discussion of the importance of the IAT among them. Then, the basic procedure of the IAT is described in detail, followed by a sketch of its psychometrics property. After that, the main explanations concerning the underlying mechanism of the IAT are analyzed and evaluated in depth. At last, three crucial questions are raised, namely as follow: whether the IAT effect can be influenced by the irrelevant features of target concept stimuli, whether the IAT effect can be influenced by content-independent factors, and to what extent the IAT effect is related to the assumed concept association.In the experiment section, three experiments are designed to explore the three questions respectively. According to the results in the three experiments as well as related findings from previous researches, the author reaches the following conclusions:(1) As an irrelevant feature, the valence of target concept stimuli exerts significant influence on the IAT effect, especially when manipulated in an extreme way so that one target concept is represented with unanimously positive stimuli and the other, negative. However, in a subtle situation such influence should not occur.(2) The IAT effect is affected by exercise effect to some extent, which means that previous test experience may contribute to the slight reduction of the IAT effect on the following test occasions. The improved D-measured IAT effect is able to attenuate such exercise effect but fails to eliminate it.(3) The IAT effect is affected by the order of combined tasks, whichmeans that the IAT effect tends to be relatively large when compatible task is conducted first, and vise versa.(4) Environmental associations exerted through memory task fail to influence the IAT effect significantly. This reveals that, not realizing the existence of exercise effect, previous related researchers have misattributed the reduction of the IAT effects to environmental associations.(5) The IAT effect is capable of revealing the relative association strength between the two target concepts and the attribute dimension, which attests the lAT's potential as a valid indirect measure, as long as the target concepts are naturally contrasted against each other and the primary goal is to explore the relationship between the two concepts instead of measuring the evaluation toward single target concept.