Introduction

Attitudes are a fundamental aspect of human behaviour, and they can shape our thoughts, feelings, and actions towards different stimuli. It is a well-established fact that attitudes can be explicit or implicit. Explicit attitudes are consciously held and often expressed through self-report measures, while implicit attitudes are unconscious and automatic, making them challenging to measure using traditional self-report methods (Cooper et al., 2015). This series of blog-posts will critically review the implementation of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a tool for assessing attitudes, with reference to relevant theory and research. Additionally, an evidence- based recommendation will be made about whether this practice should be rolled out across the whole country.

What is the Implicit Association Test (IAT)?

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a widely-used measure of implicit attitudes and associations, particularly those related to social and racial biases. Developed by Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz in 1998, the IAT measures the strength of an individual’s automatic association between mental representations of objects in memory by measuring reaction times to categorize stimuli into various categories. The IAT has been used to investigate various implicit biases, such as those related to race, gender, sexual orientation, and age.
For example, studies using the IAT have found evidence of implicit biases against Black individuals in various domains, including healthcare, education, and criminal justice. One study found that medical professionals who scored higher on the IAT for implicit bias against Black individuals were less likely to recommend thrombolysis (a clot-busting drug) to Black patients with acute coronary syndrome than to White patients with the same condition (Blair et al., 2014). In education, studies have found that implicit biases can affect teachers’ expectations and perceptions of students, leading to differential treatment and outcomes. For instance, teachers who scored higher on the IAT for implicit bias against Black individuals were more likely to rate Black students’ behaviour as problematic and to recommend disciplinary action than White students with the same behaviour (Okonofua et al., 2016).