Exploring the Reliability and Convergent Validity of Implicit Racial Evaluations

Racial evaluations have received considerable attention by researchers of implicit cognition, especially with the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT measures associative biases in a relativistic manner, whereby attitudes toward a given racial category are compared to attitudes toward another. The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) is a new behavior analytic measure of cognition that may provide a less relativistic and more specific measure of cognitive repertoires. The current study utilized a race IRAP to assess evaluative biases among a balanced sample of Black and White undergraduates. The race IRAP was administered twice in a row in conjunction with a collection of self-report measures of racial attitudes. Results for reliability and convergent validity were generally supportive. Furthermore, observed biases appeared to reflect positive in-group biases rather than derogatory attitudes toward the out-group, an effect that would not be apparent with a similarly configured race IAT. Future research may benefit from consideration of the evaluative content of the IRAP as well as the racial demographics for both the participants and the experimenters.