Relationships between the race Implicit Association Test and other measures of implicit and explicit social cognition

Resumen

Background: The race-based Implicit Association Test (IAT) was proposed to measure individual differences in implicit racial bias subsumed within social cognition. In recent years, researchers have debated the theoretical tenets underpinning the IAT, questioning whether performance on this task: (1) measures implicit attitudes that operate automatically outside of conscious awareness; (2) reflects individual differences in social cognition; and (3) can predict social behaviour. Aims: Underpinned by these debates, this study aimed to assess whether the race-IAT was related to other commonly used individual difference measures of implicit and explicit social cognition. Experiment 1 assessed whether dissociable patterns of performance on the race-IAT were related to measures of implicit imitative tendencies, emotion recognition and perspective taking towards White task actors, as well as explicit measures of trait and state empathy and racial bias. Overcoming limitations of task conceptual correspondence, Experiment 2 assessed whether these latter tasks were sensitive in detecting racial biases by using both White and Black task actors and examined their relationships with the race-IAT. Method: In two lab-based experiments, 226 and 237 participants completed the race-IAT followed by an extensive battery of social cognition measures. Results: Across both experiments, pro-White/anti-Black bias on the race-IAT was positively related to a pro-White bias on explicit measures of positive affective empathy. However, relationships between the race-IAT and implicit imitative tendencies, perspective taking, emotion recognition, and explicit trait and negative affective empathy were statistically equivalent. Conclusions: The race-IAT was consistently related to explicit measures of positive affective empathy but not to other individual difference measures of implicit social cognition. These findings are discussed with regards to the theoretical underpinnings of the race-IAT as an individual difference measure of implicit social cognition, as well as alternative explanations relating to the reliability of social cognition measures.

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Pennington, C. R., Ploszajski, M., Mistry, P., Ngombe, N., Back, C., Parsons, S., & Shaw, D. (2022). Relationships between the race Implicit Association Test and other measures of implicit and explicit social cognition. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/d63ep