Stimulus confounds in implicit and explicit measures of racial bias

Abstract

Implicit measures often show dissociations from explicit measures, including low correlations, distinct antecedents, and distinct behavioral correlates. Interpretations of these dissociations referring to measurement types presuppose that the distinction between implicit and explicit measures is not confounded with other stimulus-related differences. However, in research on racial bias, explicit measures often use verbal category labels, whereas implicit measures include images of specific exemplars. The current work addressed this confound by investigating associations between implicit and explicit measures of racial bias that include verbal category labels and images of exemplars, respectively. Experiments 1 and 2 tested whether implicit and explicit measures show stronger associations when they correspond in terms of their stimuli. Experiments 3 and 4 investigated whether previously obtained moderators of implicit-explicit relations qualify the association between measures that focus on different types of stimuli, rather than implicit and explicit measures per se. While the overall results are mixed, our analysis suggests that more attention should be paid to stimulus confounds when studying dissociations between implicit and explicit measures.