Implicit Attitude Measures: Consistency, Stability, and Convergent Validity

Abstract

In recent years, several techniques have been developed to measure implicit social cognition. Despite their increased use, little attention has been devoted to their reliability and validity. This article undertakes a direct assessment of the interitem consistency, stability, and convergent validity of some implicit attitude measures. Attitudes toward blacks and whites were measured on four separate occasions, each 2 weeks apart, using three relatively implicit measures (response-window evaluative priming, the Implicit Association Test, and the response-window Implicit Association Test) and one explicit measure (Modern Racism Scale). After correcting for interitem inconsistency with latent variable analyses, we found that (a) stability indices improved and (b) implicit measures were substantially correlated with each other, forming a single latent factor. The psychometric properties of response-latency implicit measures have greater integrity than recently suggested.