Implicit Attitude Measures

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015

Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 4

15 Pages Posted: 24 Nov 2015 Last revised: 23 Dec 2015

See all articles by Gregory Mitchell

Gregory Mitchell

University of Virginia School of Law

Philip Tetlock

University of Pennsylvania

Date Written: 2015

Abstract

Due to concerns about the willingness and ability of people to report their attitudes accurately in response to direct inquiries, psychologists have developed a number of unobtrusive, or implicit, measures of attitudes. The most popular contemporary implicit measures equate spontaneous responses to stimuli with attitudes about those stimuli. Although these measures have been used to open important new lines of inquiry, they suffer from reliability and construct validity problems and administration limitations. Researchers conducting basic research on attitudes may fruitfully utilize implicit measures as part of a multi-pronged measurement strategy, but researchers seeking to predict behavior from attitudes should continue to rely on explicit measures of attitudes, taking care to minimize reactive bias and to formulate the attitude questions at the same level of specificity as the behavior to be predicted.

Keywords: implicit attitudes, unobtrusive measures, implicit measures, explicit measures

Suggested Citation

Mitchell, Gregory and Tetlock, Philip, Implicit Attitude Measures (2015). Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015 , Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 4, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2692040

Gregory Mitchell (Contact Author)

University of Virginia School of Law ( email )

580 Massie Road
Charlottesville, VA 22903
United States
434-243-4088 (Phone)

Philip Tetlock

University of Pennsylvania ( email )

Philadelphia, PA 19104
United States

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