ABSTRACT
Psychology has a long history of developing methods to study mental states that avoid reliance on introspective self-report. Psychoanalysts, for instance, used word choice errors (Freud, 1933) or narratives generated after viewing ambiguous images (e.g., the TAT; Morgan & Murray, 1935) to infer unconscious motivations and preferences. Similarly, recognizing that verbal reports of attitudes only provide information regarding a subset of evaluative processes, social cognition researchers have developed a large arsenal of implicit attitude measures, such as the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), bona fide pipeline (see Chapter 2, this volume), and Affect Misattribution Procedure (see Chapter 15, this volume). These measures have the potential to uncover aspects of evaluative processing that occur automatically (Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986) and outside of conscious awareness (Draine & Greenwald, 1998). Thus, in addition to having the advantage that they circumvent obvious social desirability concerns (especially in sensitive domains such as prejudice), these types of indirect measures may also provide information regarding aspects of evaluative processing that people do not have accurate or complete introspective access to (e.g., processes that occur within hundreds of milliseconds). For this chapter, we define an implicit measure of attitude as one that does not require a self-report or conscious introspection.
