Journal of Personality and Soclal Psychology
1998, Vol. 74, No. 6, 1464-1480
Copyright the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0022-35 14/98/$3.00
Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition:
The Implicit Association Test
Anthony G. Greenwald, Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K. Schwartz
University of Washington
An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an
attribute. The 2 concepts appear in a 2-choice task (e.g., flower vs. insect names), and the attribute
in a 2nd task (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant words for an evaluation attribute). When instructions
oblige highly associated categories (e.g., flower + pleasant) to share a response key, performance
is faster than when less associated categories (e.g., insect + pleasant) share a key. This performance
difference implicitly measures differential association of the 2 concepts with the attribute. In 3
experiments, the IAT was sensitive to (a) near-universal evaluative differences (e.g., flower vs.
insect), (b) expected individual differences in evaluative associations (Japanese + pleasant vs.
Korean + pleasant for Japanese vs. Korean subjects), and (c) consciously disavowed evaluative
differences (Black + pleasant vs. White + pleasant for self-described unprejudiced White subjects).
Consider a thought experiment. You are shown a series of
male and female faces, to which you are to respond as rapidly
as possible by saying "hello" if the face is male and "goodbye"
if it is female. For a second task, you are shown a series of
male and female names, to which you are to respond rapidly
with "hello" for male names and "goodbye" for female names.
These discriminations are both designed to be easy-the faces
and names are unambiguously male or female. For a final task
you are asked to perform both of these discriminations alter-
nately. That is, you are shown a series of alternating faces and
names, and you are to say "hello" if the face or name is male
and "goodbye" if the face or name is female. If you guess that
this combined task will be easy, you are correct.
Now imagine a small variation of the thought experiment.
The first discrimination is the same ("hello" to male faces,
"goodbye" to female faces), but the second is reversed ( "good-
bye" to male names, "hello" to female names). As with the
first experiment, each of these tasks, by itself, is easy. However,
when you contemplate mixing the two tasks ("hello" to male
face or female name and "goodbye" to female face or male
name), you may suspect that this new combined task will be
difficult. Unless you wish to make many errors, you will have
to respond considerably more slowly than in the previous
experiment.
The expected difficulty of the experiment with the reversed
Anthony G. Greenwald, Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K.
Schwartz, Department of Psychology, University of Washington.
This research was partially supported by Grant SBR-9422242 from
the National Science Foundation and Grant MH 41328 from the National
Institute of Mental Health. For comments on a draft of this article, the
authors thank Mahzarin Banaji, Shelly Farnham, Laurie Rudman, and
Yuichi Shoda.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to An-
thony G. Greenwald, Department of Psychology, Box 35 1525, University
of Washington, Seattle, Washington 981951525, Electronic mail may
be sent to agg@u.washington.edu.
second discrimination follows from the existence of strong asso-
ciations of male names to male faces and female names to female
faces. The attempt to map the same two responses ("hello"
and "goodbye") in opposite ways onto the two gender contrasts
is resisted by well-established associations that link the face
and name domains. The (assumed) performance difference be-
tween the two versions of the combined task indeed measures
the strength of gender-based associations between the face and
name domains. This pair of thought experiments provides the
model for a method, the implicit association test (IAT), that
is potentially useful for diagnosing a wide range of socially
significant associative structures. The present research sought
specifically to appraise the IAT method’s usefulness for measur-
ing evaluative associations that underlie implicit attitudes
(Greenwald & Banaji, 1995).
Measuring Implicit Attitudes
Implicit attitudes are manifest as actions or judgments that
are under the control of automatically activated evaluation, with-
out the performer’s awareness of that causation (Greenwald &
Banaji, 1995, pp. 6-8).’ The IAT procedure seeks to measure
implicit attitudes by measuring their underlying automatic evalu-
ation. The IAT is therefore similar in intent to cognitive priming
procedures for measuring automatic affect or attitude (e.g.,
Bargh, Chaiken, Govender, & Pratto, 1992; Fazio, Sanbonmatsu,
Powell, & Kardes, 1986; Fazio, 1993; Greenwald, Klinger, &
Liu, 1989; Perdue, Dovidio, Gurtman, & Tyler, 1990; Perdue &
Gurtman, 1990) .’
I Greenwald and Banaji (1995) defined implicit attitudes as "intro-
spectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experi-
ence that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action
toward social objects" (p. 8).
A few recent studies have indicated that priming measures may be
sensitive enough to serve as measures of individual differences in the
strength of automatic attitudinal evaluation (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1995;
Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995). At the same time, other
studies have indicated that priming is relatively unaffected by variations

IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST
Task
description
Sequence
Task
2
1
Initial
terget-compt
disaimination
3 4 5
BLACK
instructions
I IME*
Sample
stimuli
MEREDITH 0
0 LATONYA
0 SHAVONN
HEATHER 0
0 TASHIKA
KATIE 0
BETSY 0
0 EBONY
As~~~l~eted
attribute
discrimination
pleasant
unpleasant
0 lucky
o honor
poison 0
grief o
o gift
disaster o
0 happy
hatred 0
task disajmination task
0 JASMINE
o pleasure
PEGGY 0
evil o
COLLEEN 0
o miracle
0 TEMEKA
bomb o
WHITE
unpleasant
0 COURTNEY
0 STEPHANlE
SHEREEN 0
0 SUE-ELLEN
TIA 0
SHARISE 0
0 MEGAN
NICHELLE 0
o peace
LATISHA 0
filth 0
0 LAUREN
o rainbow
SHANISE 0
accident o
0 NANCY
0 WHITE
Figure 1. Schematic description and illustration of the implicit association test (IAT). The IAT procedure
of the present experiments involved a series of five discrimination tasks (numbered columns). A pair of
target concepts and an attribute dimension are introduced in the first two steps. Categories for each of these
discriminations are assigned to a left or right response, indicated by the black circles in the third row.
These are combined in the third step and then recombined in the fifth step, after reversing response
assignments (in the fourth step) for the target-concept discrimination. The illustration uses stimuli for the
specific tasks for one of the task-order conditions of Experiment 3, with correct responses indicated as open
WHITE
unpleasant
circles.
One might appreciate the IAT’s potential value as a measure
of socially significant automatic associations by changing the
thought experiment to one in which the to-be-distinguished faces
of the first task are Black or White (e.g., "hello" to African
American faces and "goodbye" to European American faces)
and the second task is to classify words as pleasant or unpleasant
in meaning ( "hello" to pleasant words, "goodbye" to unpleas-
ant words). The two possible combinations of these tasks can
be abbreviated as Black + pleasant and White + plea~ant.~
Black + pleasant should be easier than White + pleasant if
there is a stronger association between Black Americans and
pleasant meaning than between White Americans and pleasant
meaning. If the preexisting associations are opposite in direc-
tion-which might be expected for White subjects raised in a
culture imbued with pervasive residues of a history of anti-
Black discrimination-the subject should find White + pleasant
to be easier.
A possible property of the IAT-and one that is similar to a
major virtue of cognitive priming methods-is that it may resist
masking by self-presentation strategies. That is, the implicit
association method may reveal attitudes and other automatic
associations even for subjects who prefer not to express those
attitudes.
in attitude strength (Bargh et al., 1992; Chaiken & Bargh, 1993). im-
plying that it may be limited in sensitivity to intra- or interindividual
differences.
Design of the IAT
Figure 1 describes the sequence of tasks that constitute the
IAT measures in this research and illustrates this sequence with
materials from the present Experiment 3. The IAT assesses the
association between a target-concept discrimination and an at-
tribute dimension. The procedure starts with introduction of the
target-concept discrimination. In Figure 1, this initial discrimi-
nation is to distinguish first names that are (in the United States)
recognizable as Black or African American from ones recogniz-
able as White or European American. This and subsequent dis-
criminations are performed by assigning one category to a re-
sponse by the left hand and the other to a response by the right
hand. The second step is introduction of the attribute dimension,
also in the form of a two-category discrimination. For all of the
present experiments, the attribute discrimination was evaluation,
represented by the task of categorizing words as pleasant versus
unpleasant in meaning. After this introduction to the target dis-
crimination and to the attribute dimension, the two are superim-
posed in the third step, in which stimuli for target and attribute
discriminations appear on alternate trials. In the fourth step, the
respondent learns a reversal of response assignments for the
target discrimination, and the fifth (final) step combines the
attribute discrimination (not changed in response assignments)
with this reversed target discrimination. If the target categories
Black + pleasant means that African American faces and pleasant
words share the same response; it could equally have been described as
White + unpleasant.