Are Relational Implicit Measures Sensitive to Relational Information?

Abstract

Evidence increasingly suggests that information about the relation between stimuli can impact responses on implicit measures, but those measures were not designed to capture this information in a controlled manner. Relational implicit measures have therefore been developed to assess such relational information in a more specific manner. Such measures have been used to assess relational beliefs in a variety of contexts. However, despite numerous theoretical inferences having been made under the premise that these measures validly measure relational content, this assumption has not been directly tested. Across four preregistered experiments (N = 747) participants learned information about different relations between two fictitious social groups and traits (e.g., Niffites are kind, Luupites should be kind). We then tested whether relational implicit measures (the RRT, aIAT, and PEP) reflected this information. Overall, only a mousetracking variant of the PEP effectively produced the expected effects for both are- and should-based relational information. Our results suggest that many relational implicit measures (as currently used) are not sensitive to relational information in ways previously assumed, although the use of alternative scoring methods that incorporate accuracy information may represent a step towards improving this sensitivity.