Anthony Greenwald

University of Washington | UW · Department of Psychology

This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was n...

Accumulated findings from studies in which implicit-bias measures correlate with discriminatory judgment and behavior have led many social scientists to conclude that implicit biases play a causal role in racial and other discrimination. In turn, that belief has promoted and sustained two lines of work to develop remedies: (a) individual treatment...

Interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has stimulated many research investigations. Much of this research has used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure association strengths that are presumed to underlie implicit biases. It had been more than a decade since the last...

This longitudinal study examined early social-cognitive markers that might be associated with the emergence of childhood depression and anxiety. At 5 years of age, 137 children completed an implicit self-esteem measure. At 9 years of age, the same children completed measures of implicit self-esteem, explicit self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. Tw...

Self‐esteem remains one of social psychology's central constructs, despite disagreements about its theoretical interpretation and methods of measurement. This entry provides an overview of alternative views of structure and empirical controversies about the function of self‐esteem in personality. Special emphasis is placed on recent advancement in...

Self‐esteem remains one of social psychology's central constructs, despite disagreements about its theoretical interpretation and methods of measurement. This entry provides an overview of alternative views of structure and empirical controversies about the function of self‐esteem in personality. Special emphasis is placed on recent advancement in...

This meta-analysis evaluated theoretical predictions from balanced identity theory (BIT) and evaluated the validity of zero points of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self-report measures used to test these predictions. Twenty-one researchers contributed individual subject data from 36 experiments (total N = 12,773) that used both explicit and i...

Scientific interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has produced a large corpus of empirical findings. In addition to much evidence for validity and usefulness of Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures, there have been psychological critiques of empirical findings and theoreti...

In the last 20 years, research on implicit social cognition has established that social judgments and behavior are guided by attitudes and stereotypes of which the actor may lack awareness. Research using the methods of implicit social cognition has produced the concept of implicit bias, which has generated wide attention not only in social, clinic...

Using data from 217 research reports (N = 36,071, compared to 3,471 and 5,433 in previous meta-analyses), this meta-analysis investigated the conceptual and methodological conditions under which Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring attitudes, stereotypes, and identity correlate with criterion measures of intergroup behavior. We found signifi...

Using data from 217 research reports (N = 36,071, compared to 3,471 and 5,433 in previous meta-analyses), this meta-analysis investigated the conceptual and methodological conditions under which Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring attitudes, stereotypes, and identity correlate with criterion measures of intergroup behavior. We found signifi...

Individual differences in general speed lead to a positive correlation between the mean and standard deviation of mean latency. This “coarse” scaling effect causes the mean latency difference (MLD) to be spuriously correlated with general speed. Within individuals, the correlation between the mean and standard deviation of trial latencies leads con...

Unpronounceable strings of 4 consonants (conditioned stimuli: CSs) were consistently followed by familiar words belonging to 1 of 2 opposed semantic categories (unconditioned stimuli: USs). Conditioning, in the form of greater accuracy in rapidly classifying USs into their categories, was found when visually imperceptible (to most subjects) CSs occ...

In the 1970s, memory researchers converged on interesting phenomena observed in Korsakoff-syndrome amnesic patients. These patients’ performances on difficult tasks were reliably improved by practice sessions from which they could recall nothing. Related findings of indirect memory effects in college students triggered wide attention to phenomena t...

Mentally rehearsing unfamiliar first names for the purpose of categorizing them into a group produces both preference for and, more surprisingly, identification with the group of names (i.e., association of the names with self; Greenwald, Pickrell, & Farnham, 2002). The present research started as an effort to determine how these ‘implicit partisan...

We propose to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance for claims of new discoveries from 0.05 to 0.005.

"We propose to change the default P-value threshold forstatistical significance for claims of new discoveries from 0.05 to 0.005."

In their review of validity of Implicit Association Test and affective priming, De Houwer, Teige-Mocigemba, Spruyt, and Moors (2009) identified validity with establishment of “basic theoretical understanding” of the measures. We agree that theoretical understanding has an important role in making measures more valid and useful. Nevertheless, we con...

About 70% of more than half a million Implicit Association Tests completed by citizens of 34 countries revealed expected implicit stereotypes associating science with males more than with females. We discovered that nation-level implicit stereotypes predicted nation-level sex differences in 8th-grade science and mathematics achievement. Self-report...

Those who converse regularly with their smartphones know that the language skills of computing devices have emerged from a lengthy childhood. On page [183][1] of this issue, Caliskan et al. unveil a new language achievement of artificial intelligence (AI) ( 1 ). In large bodies of English-language text, they decipher content corresponding to human...

Presents an obituary for Earl Busby Hunt—known to family, friends, and colleagues as Buz—who died at home in Bellevue, Washington, on April 12, 2016. Buz specialized in artificial intelligence (AI) and had a main focus in cognitive psychology. In fact he was editor of Cognitive Psychology from 1974-1987. Buz’s honors include the Lifetime Achievemen...

H. Blanton and J. Jaccard (2006) questioned the 4-test regression method used byA. G. Greenwald et al. (2002) to test a pure multiplicative theory. We address their concerns with a combination of simulations and meta-analysis. Simulations show that (a) Blanton and Jaccard’s preferred simultaneous regression method suffers severe power loss in testi...

Numeric values of psychological measures often have an arbitrary character before research has grounded their meanings, thereby providing what S. J. Messick (1995) called consequential validity (part of which H. Blanton and J. Jaccard, 200x, now identify as metric meaningfulness). Some measures are predisposed by their design to acquire meanings ea...

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) requires responding to category contrasts such as young vs. old, male vs. female, and pleasant vs. unpleasant. In introducing the IAT, A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, and J. L. K. Schwartz (1998) proposed that IAT measures reflect mental structures involving the nominal features of the IAT’s categories (e.g., age...

A brief version of the Implicit Association Test (BIAT) has been introduced. The present research identified analytical best practices for overall psychometric performance of the BIAT. In 7 studies and multiple replications, we investigated analytic practices with several evaluation criteria: sensitivity to detecting known effects and group differe...

In reporting Implicit Association Test (IAT) results, researchers have most often used scoring conventions described in the first publication of the IAT (A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998). Demonstration IATs available on the Internet have produced large data sets that were used here to evaluate alternative scoring procedures...

Differences between traditional laboratory research and Internet-based research require review of basic issues of research methodology. These differences have implications for research ethics (e.g., absence of researcher, potential exposure of confidential data and/or identity to a third-party, guaranteed debriefing) and security (e.g., confidentia...

Respondents at an Internet website completed over 600,000 Implicit Association Tests (IATs) between October 1998 and April 2000 to measure attitudes toward and stereotypes of social groups (www.yale.edu/implicit). Their responses demonstrated, on average, implicit preference for white over black and young over old, and stereotypic associations link...

Since its first publication in 1998, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has been used repeatedly to measure implicit attitudes and other automatic associations. Although there have also been a few studies critical of the IAT, there now exists substantial evidence for the IAT=s convergent and discriminant validity, including new evidence reported i...

This theoretical integration of social psychology’s main cognitive and affective constructs was shaped by three influences: (a) recent widespread interest in automatic and implicit cognition, (b) development of the Implicit Association Test (IAT: Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), and (c) social psychology's consistency theories of the 1950s – e...

We examined the role of group membership (being female or male), implicit identity with social groups (me=male/female), and math-gender stereotypes (math=male) in predicting implicit math attitudes (math=good) and math identity (math=me). In addition, we investigated the relationship between implicit and explicit preferences and SAT performance. Co...

Problem: Implicit white race preference has been associated with discrimination in the education, criminal justice, and health care systems and could impede the entry of African Americans into the medical profession, where they and other minorities remain underrepresented. Little is known about implicit racial bias in medical school admissions com...

14 PI Demo site IAT study data from 2002 to current

in press, JPSP. Abstract: Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, and Banaji (2009; GPUB) reported an average predictive validity correlation of r =.236 for Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures involving Black–White racial attitudes and stereotypes. Oswald, Mitchell, Blanton, Jaccard, and Tetlock (2013; OMBJT) reported a lower aggregate figure for correl...

Self-esteem is one of social psychology's central constructs. Despite the wide endorsement of the importance of self-esteem, there remains substantial variation in theoretical conceptions of how self-esteem functions. To help address this point, 234 5-year-old children were tested across 3 studies using a new implicit measure. A new Preschool Impli...

We examined community providers’ stereotypes about mental illnesses and their association with clinical competencies among mental health professionals in Washington State’s community mental health system (N=584). Mental Health Competence and Recovery Implicit Association Tests were developed. The Competency Assessment Instrument (CAI) measured prov...

Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, and Banaji (2009; GPUB hereafter) reported an average predictive validity correlation of ̄r = .236 for Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures involving Black-White racial attitudes and stereotypes. Oswald, Mitchell, Blanton, Jaccard, and Tetlock (2013; OMBJT) reported a lower aggregate figure for correlations involvi...

Dramatic forms of discrimination, such as lynching, property destruction, and hate crimes, are widely understood to be consequences of prejudicial hostility. This article focuses on what has heretofore been only an infrequent countertheme in scientific work on discrimination-that favoritism toward ingroups can be responsible for much discrimination...

This data archive includes Race Implicit Association Test (IAT) scores of 2,355,303 Internet volunteers who completed educational/demonstration versions of the Race IAT at https://implicit.harvard.edu from 2002 to 2012. Data in this archive can be downloaded for all years, either separately by year or in a single file. Codebooks, indicating the var...

A brief version of the Implicit Association Test (BIAT) has been introduced. The present research identified analytical best practices for overall psychometric performance of the BIAT. In 7 studies and multiple replications, we investigated analytic practices with several evaluation criteria: sensitivity to detecting known effects and group differe...

Although a greater degree of personal obesity is associated with weaker negativity toward overweight people on both explicit (i.e., self-report) and implicit (i.e., indirect behavioral) measures, overweight people still prefer thin people on average. We investigated whether the national and cultural context - particularly the national prevalence of...

(such as racial and ethnic groups), or abstract concepts (such as abortion rights or God). Social psychologists have long interpreted attitude objects as abstract mental representations. This cognitive conception,of motivation was notable for its deviation from the reductionist physical sjirnulus approach to motivation in experimental psychology be...

Sriram and Greenwald (2009) introduced a Brief version of the Implicit Association Test (BIAT). The present research identified analytical best practices for overall psychometric performance of the BIAT. In 7 studies and multiple replications, we investigated analytic practices with several evaluation criteria: sensitivity to detecting known effect...

Answering a question about performance of a behavior influences the probability of a person performing a target action in the future. Although this question-behavior effect has been shown across multiple contexts, several theoretical mechanisms have been suggested to drive the effect. While various explanations have been offered for the question-be...

Given the substantial and growing scientific literature on implicit bias, the time has now come to confront a critical question: What, if anything, should we do about implicit bias in the courtroom? The author team comprises legal academics, scientists, researchers, and even a sitting federal judge who seek to answer this question in accordance wit...

There is an imperative to predict hazardous drinking among college students. Implicit measures have been useful in predicting unique variance in drinking and alcohol-related problems. However, they have been developed to test different theories of drinking and have rarely been directly compared with one another. Thus, their comparative utility is u...

We examined the associations of clinicians' implicit attitudes about race with visit communication and patient ratings of care. In a cross-sectional study of 40 primary care clinicians and 269 patients in urban community-based practices, we measured clinicians' implicit general race bias and race and compliance stereotyping with 2 implicit associat...

We examined the association between pediatricians' attitudes about race and treatment recommendations by patients' race. We conducted an online survey of academic pediatricians (n = 86). We used 3 Implicit Association Tests to measure implicit attitudes and stereotypes about race. Dependent variables were recommendations for pain management, urinar...

This article documents two facts that are provocative in juxtaposition. First: There is multidecade durability of theory controversies in psychology, demonstrated here in the subdisciplines of cognitive and social psychology. Second: There is a much greater frequency of Nobel science awards for contributions to method than for contributions to theo...

The self-concept is one of the main organizing constructs in the behavioral sciences because it influences how people interpret their environment, the choices they make, whether and how they initiate action, and the pursuit of specific goals. Because belonging to social groups and feeling interconnected is critical to human survival, the authors pr...

Overt love of God and country have seemingly been prerequisites to be president in the United States in recent decades, if not always. Indeed, the 2008 presidential race was replete with campaign messages showcasing such perspectives—that Barack Obama and John McCain were religiously faithful and deeply patriotic. Scholarship demonstrates the poten...

The Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT) is an adaptation of an established social cognition measure (IAT) for use with preschool children. Two studies with 4-year-olds found that the PSIAT was effective in evaluating (a) attitudes toward commonly liked objects (flowers=good) and (b) gender attitudes (girl=good or boy=good). The gender attit...

Job attitudes, as indicators of well-being, vary within individuals across cognitive processes and not just time. Research on employee well-being has relied primarily on self-reported measures of explicit job and life attitudes. Our work takes a different perspective on this issue by examining the role of implicit attitudes regarding one's organiza...

A total of 247 American children between 6 and 10 years of age (126 girls and 121 boys) completed Implicit Association Tests and explicit self-report measures assessing the association of (a) me with male (gender identity), (b) male with math (math-gender stereotype), and (c) me with math (math self-concept). Two findings emerged. First, as early a...

For 40 years researchers have studied minimal groups using a variety of induction procedures which, surprisingly, have never been formally evaluated. This article reports two experiments that compared minimal group induction procedures based on: (1) memorization of novel ingroup names; (2) an imagination instruction; (3) random assignment; and (4)...

Male and female participants were instructed to produce an altered response pattern on an Implicit Association Test measure of gender identity by slowing performance in trials requiring the same response to stimuli designating own gender and self. Participants' faking success was found to be predictable by a measure of slowing relative to unfaked p...

This obituary describes the life achievements of social psychologist, Timothy C. Brock, founder and guiding force of Ohio State University's acclaimed social psychology doctoral program in social psychology. He was born in 1935 and died at his home in Upper Arlington, Ohio, on December 20, 2009. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights re...

The development and psychometric properties of an Implicit Association Test (IAT) measuring implicit attitude toward smoking among fifth grade children were described. The IAT with "sweets" as the contrast category resulted in higher correlations with explicit attitudes than did the IAT with "healthy foods" as the contrast category. Children with f...

Abstract The present experiment measured an EEG indicator of motor cortex activation, the lateralized readiness potential (LRP), while participants performed a speeded category classification task. The LRP data showed that visually masked words triggered covert motor activations. These prime-induced motor activations preceded motor activations by s...

Multifarious psychological constructs are indexed by the mean latency difference (MLD), the within-subject difference between mean response latency on two tasks. Two associations consistently emerge in mean latency data. Firstly, across subjects, mean latencies on distinct tasks are positively correlated. This correlation arises from individual dif...

The comment articles in this issue by Friese and Fiedler (F&F) and by Rothermund and Wentura (R&W) offer perspectives on the validity of the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) (Sriram & Greenwald, 2009; S&G). F&F concluded that construct validity of the BIAT can be established only by conducting studies that experimentally manipulate associatio...

In the week before the 2008 United States presidential election, 1,057 registered voters reported their choice between the principal contenders (John McCain and Barack Obama) and completed several measures that might predict their candidate preference, including two implicit and two self-report measures of racial preference for European Americans (...

Recent reports suggest that providers' implicit attitudes about race contribute to racial and ethnic health care disparities. However, little is known about physicians' implicit racial attitudes. This study measured implicit and explicit attitudes about race using the Race Attitude Implicit Association Test (IAT) for a large sample of test takers (...

About 70% of more than half a million Implicit Association Tests completed by citizens of 34 countries revealed expected implicit stereotypes associating science with males more than with females. We discovered that nation-level implicit stereotypes predicted nation-level sex differences in 8th-grade science and mathematics achievement. Self-report...

This review of 122 research reports (184 independent samples, 14,900 subjects) found average r = .274 for prediction of behavioral, judgment, and physiological measures by Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures. Parallel explicit (i.e., self-report) measures, available in 156 of these samples (13,068 subjects), also predicted effectively (average...

In their review of validity of the Implicit Association Test and affective priming, J. De Houwer, S. Teige-Mocigemba, A. Spruyt, and A. Moors identified validity with establishment of "basic theoretical understanding" of the measures. It is agreed that theoretical understanding has an important role in making measures more valid and useful. Neverth...

The Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) consists of two blocks of trials with the same four categories and stimulus-response mappings as the standard IAT, but with 1/3 the number of trials. Unlike the standard IAT, the BIAT focuses the subject on just two of each block's four categories. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that attitude BIATs had s...

Decision makers are expected to identify and perhaps recuse themselves from actions that affect entities (such as relatives or corporations) to which their relationships create an appearance of conflict of interest. This article illustrates relationships that can create conflicts of interest for editors, grant decision makers, journal and grant rev...

Implicit Association Tests (IATs) often reveal strong associations of self with positive rather than negative attributes. This poses a problem in using the IAT to measure associations involving traits with either positive or negative evaluative content. In two studies, we employed non-bipolar but evaluatively balanced Big Five traits as attribute c...

Addiction is characterized by dyscontrol – substance use despite intentions to restrain. Using a sample of at-risk drinkers, the present study examined whether an implicit measure of alcohol motivation (the Implicit Association Test [IAT]; Greenwald, A.G., McGhee, D.E., & Schwartz, J.L.K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cogniti...

Background: Recent reports suggest that health care provider implicit attitudes about race may contribute to racial and ethnic health care disparities. A social psychological perspective may help to understand provider contribution to health care disparities. Objective: We used a measure of social cognition, the Race Attitude Implicit Association...

Recent reports speculate that provider implicit attitudes about race may contribute to racial/ethnic health care disparities. We hypothesized that implicit racial bias exists among pediatricians, implicit and explicit measures would differ and implicit measures may be related to quality of care. A single-session, Web survey of academic pediatrician...

Question–behavior research has frequently demonstrated that asking questions about future behaviors increases the performance of socially normative behaviors. In response to Fitzsimons and Moore's review (2008) of the question–behavior effect in the context of risky behaviors, we consider how asking questions about an undesirable behavior may incre...

This review discusses basic features of Implicit Association Tests (IATs) that are relevant in order to estimate their suitability of IATs for the valid assessment of individual differences. We start with a description of the essential characteristics of the procedures of IATs and also refer to theoretical accounts for IAT effects. Then, we provide...

Many recent experiments have used parallel Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self- report measures of attitudes. These measures are sometimes strongly correlated. However, many of these studies find apparent dissociations in the form of (a) weak correlations between the two types of measures, (b) separation of their means on scales that should co...

Background and Significance: Well-documented disparities exist in quality of health care for racial/ethnic populations in the US. The following question guided this research: Why would health care providers, who generally believe in quality of care for all, offer poorer quality or inappropriate care to racial/ethnic minority patients? A recent repo...

http://implicit.harvard.edu/ was created to provide experience with the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a procedure designed to measure social knowledge that may operate outside awareness or control. Significant by-products of the website's existence are large datasets contributed to by the site's many visitors. This article summarises data from m...

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study found that even though children from all East Asian countries outperformed American children, American students reported higher self-evaluation of their math and science abilities than did students from East Asian countries such as China, Korea, and Japan (Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez, & Chrosto...

The commentary to this special issue discusses how current research on implicit and automatic processes in personality is related to previous attempts to conceptualise and measure automatic or implicit aspects of personality that are difficult to assess using standard self-report measures. The six original contributions of this issue are discussed...

Four experiments demonstrate category congruency priming by subliminal prime words that were never seen as targets in a valence-classification task (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and a gender-classification task (Experiment 3). In Experiment 1, overlap in terms of word fragments of one or more letters between primes and targets of different valences was...

Individual differences in general speed lead to a positive correlation between the mean and standard deviation of mean latency. This “coarse” scaling effect causes the mean latency difference (MLD) to be spuriously correlated with general speed. Within individuals, the correlation between the mean and standard deviation of trial latencies leads con...

Blanton and Jaccard (see record 2006-01885-009) drafted a Postscript in response to our Reply (see record 2006-01885-010). Their Postscript has two types of arguments: (a) repetitions of statements made previously in their article and already addressed in our Reply (thus needing no further comment here) and (b) regrettably, responses to arguments...

Blanton and Jaccard (see record 2006-01885-008) questioned the 4-test regression method used by Greenwald et al. (see record 2002-00351-001) to test a pure multiplicative theory. The present authors address Blanton and Jaccard's concerns with a combination of simulations and meta-analysis. Simulations show that (a) Blanton and Jaccard's preferred...

Abstract The mere association of objects with the self-concept can improve evaluations of the objects even when the association is arbitrary and is processed implicitly. In two experiments, neutral objects that were pairedwith self-concept terms in a categorization task subsequently received more favorable evaluations than did objects paired with o...