Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Prejudice and Discrimination Arise—and Change?
Separate task performance from claims about hidden attitudes, stable traits, or future actions.
Why you’re reading it. Establish what measurement can and cannot contribute to an explanation of prejudice.
A question to consider. An organization wants to use one indirect test to identify employees likely to discriminate. What evidence would it need beyond a difference in task scores?
Why this reading
What does a faster response on a sorting task establish about a person? This review separates measured performance from the mental processes proposed to explain it.
Before you read
An indirect measure infers evaluation from a task rather than asking for it directly. The Implicit Association Test compares sorting speed and accuracy. Reliability concerns consistency; validity concerns the interpretation and use of a score.
Read for
- Distinguish the observed response from claims about awareness, associations, or beliefs.
- Compare stable characteristics, temporary states, and situational influences as explanations.
- Separate predicting another behavior from explaining why it occurs.
Consider afterwards
- A person's score changes between sessions. What evidence would distinguish attitude change, a context effect, and measurement error?
Editorial context
The authors advocate a way of organizing contested evidence, not a settled account of everything an indirect task measures. The review does not establish a diagnostic threshold for individuals. Forscher and colleagues' synthesis also cautions against assuming that changing implicit-task performance necessarily changes behavior.