Do you associate concepts without realizing?

The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts and evaluations or stereotypes by measuring participant reaction time when asked to quickly sort words into categories. When concepts that are related (have a strong association) share the same response key, participants tend to respond more quickly (have a faster reaction time). The IAT, therefore, is a useful tool for measuring attitudes and beliefs that individuals may be unwilling or unable to self-report, and can even illuminate implicit attitudes that they did not know they had.

Resources:

• https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
• Rezaei, A.R.(2011). Validity and reliability of the IAT: Measuring gender and ethnic stereotypes. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(5), 1937-1941. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.04.018.

Task structure summary

There are 8 words belonging to the category 'female' and 8 words belonging to the category 'male'. There are 7 words belonging to the category 'science' and 7 words belonging to the category 'liberal arts'.
There are 7 sub-tasks of the IAT, 3 of which are control tasks and 4 of which are test tasks:

• Task 1 (Control): categorize into male/female
• Task 2 (Control): categorize into science/liberal arts
• Task 3 (Test): categorize into a pairing male-science/female-liberal arts OR male-liberal arts/female-science
• Task 4 (Test): same as previous task (same stimuli set, but sequence is always randomized, so just provides more test data)
• Task 5 (Control): categorize into male/female but positions on screen are switched
• Task 6 (Test): whichever pairing did not happen in Tasks 3/4
• Task 7 (Test): same as previous task

The order parameter controls which pairing the participant sees first. If set to 'A' (default), the participant sees male-liberal arts/female-science first. If set to 'B', the participant sees male-science/female-liberal arts first.

Parameters
The following features can be tweaked (default values in parentheses):

• Number of trials per control stimulus word-pairing (2)
• Number of trials per test stimulus word-pairing (2)
• Task order ('A')
• Duration of inter-trial interval (100 ms)

What data is collected? How is it scored?
The following variables are recorded:

• rt_correct_task1_science
• rt_correct_task1_liberalarts
• rt_correct_task2_male
• rt_correct_task2_female
• rt_correct_science_male
• rt_correct_science_female
• rt_correct_liberalarts_male
• rt_correct_liberalarts_female
• proportion_correct_task1_science
• proportion_correct_task1_liberalarts
• proportion_correct_task2_male
• proportion_correct_task2_female
• proportion_correct_science_male
• proportion_correct_science_female
• proportion_correct_liberalarts_male
• proportion_correct_liberalarts_female

The main variables are reaction time (ms) and the proportion correct responses, by pairing condition (male-science, male-liberal arts, female-science, female-liberal arts) as well as control conditions (task 1:science, liberal arts; task 2: male, female)