In ongoing research concerning implicit social cognition we have developed the view that important components of the cognitive processes that underlie social actions are (a) ordinarily hidden from the actor's awareness or ability to control and, as a consequence, (b) beyond the possibility of effective investigation using methods that are limited to self-report measures. Our research has successfully employed several indirect measures to reveal the operation of implicit stereotypes. The first goal of this project is to extend these investigations of implicit social cognition to the domains of the social-cognitive constructs of implicit attitudes and implicit self-esteem. Existing measures of unconscious social cognition (most prominently semantic priming measures) have some notable limitations. Although these measures have been used effectively at laboratories in which they were developed, they (a) have not readily been exported to other laboratories and (b) have not yielded large enough effect sizes to succeed as individual difference measures. Our previous NSF-funded research has yielded a new procedure (the Implicit Association Test, IAT) that has been shown to provide a reliable, efficient, and sensitive measure of individual differences in implicit social cognition. The second goal of the current project is to document the basic properties of the IAT method and to develop its use as a core technique for investigating implicit social cognition. The research will yield three types of desirable products: (a) new measures that should be broadly useful in psychological investigations of social behavior, (b) new theoretical insights into the involvement of unconscious cognition in social behavior, and (c)applications in important settings, such as workplace and school, in which unrecognized (i.e., implicit) stereotypes and prejudices interfere with desirable or productive behavior.
