The Implicit Association Test as a measure of automatically activated associations: Range and limits

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is probably the most well known and most widespread measure of automatically activated associations. Even though, there is supportive evidence for the validity of the IAT, there are still controversies about its underlying psychological processes. The following article provides an overview of the available research on the IAT, illustrating both the range and the limits of the measure. This review includes the relation to explicit self-report measures, evidence,for its predictive ability, studies on context and material effects, and the role of systematic error variance. Based on this review, we draw conclusions about the convergent, discriminant, predictive, incremental, and internal validity of the IAT, and critically discuss some common, interpretations in IAT research.