ABSTRACT
The implicit association test is thought to quantify "implicit biases." Implicit bias is a term of art referring to prejudiced implicit attitudes, and implicit attitudes are, of course, contrasted with explicit attitudes. This chapter describes the some most prominent ways that researchers in the empirical literature have characterized implicit racial attitudes. Different theories of implicit social cognition align with different philosophical interpretations of contemporary racial cognition. One theory stems from research on automaticity and considers implicit biases to reflect people's "true" attitudes in the absence of "contamination" by strategic self-presentation considerations. A second theory stems from research on memory and considers implicit biases to be unconscious counterparts to people's conscious attitudes. Associative-Propositional model of Evaluation (APE) suggests that an attitude is implicit when it is "validity-inapt." The chapter concludes by considering what the research on implicit bias tells about contemporary racial attitudes if APE's conceptualization of implicitness is correct.
