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Alternatives to self-reports: Conditional reasoning problems and IAT-based tasks.
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Many studies have indicated that self-reports, as the dominant method of personality assessment, have certain limitations. For example, respondents may be unaware of their true standing on the assessed psychological trait, or could even fake their responses in order to be seen in a more desirable light. Additionally, self-reports do not capture unconscious, implicit processes that are also important for understanding individuals’ psychological functioning. These limitations of self-reports call for new methods of personality assessment. In this chapter, we describe two methods that circumvent problems related to self-reports: conditional reasoning problems, and the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for self-concept measurement. These two methods differ from the conventional methods of personality assessment because they do not require respondents to describe themselves using a set of statements. On the one hand, within the conditional reasoning approach, respondents are asked to solve a number of inductive reasoning problems. These problems are designed for assessing the respondents’ motive-based implicit biases, thus serving as a measure of personality. On the other hand, within the IAT participants need to sort the stimuli from two contrasted targets (self vs. others) and two contrasted categories related to psychological attributes in accordance with several categorization criteria using only two response keys. The response latencies on this sorting task reflect the strength of the associations between the concept of self and measured psychological attributes, revealing the structure of the self-concept's associative network. For each approach we first review the general logic behind its use in personality assessment, and then describe the method's application for measuring one specific trait – aggressiveness.
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... Alternatively, more experimental options are available, too, to assess curiosity more detached from self-serving biases. Conditional reasoning tasks are frequently used for the assessment of psychological variables like self-concept or self-esteem (see e.g., Galić et al., 2016). These might also present an option to assess curiosity in a more indirect way. ...
The five-dimensional curiosity-scale revised by Kashdan et al. (2020) is the most comprehensive inventory of curiosity. We provide the first validation of this newly proposed structure of curiosity in cultures (Germany and UK) other than the United States. In the process, we develop the first adaptation of this inventory in another language, namely German (6DNS). We also provide the first measurement invariance analyses for this curiosity inventory across two cultures and the socio-demographics age, sex, and education. We use two diverse quota samples from Germany (N = 486) and the UK (N = 483). In both countries, we investigate the single facets' reliability, factorial validity, and convergent and divergent validity with a large set of individual-differences constructs. Findings demonstrate that both the new German version (6DNS) and the English version (5DCR) show psychometric properties similar to the original findings by Kashdan et al. (2020). Moreover, all facets of the inventory reach at least scalar invariance across cultures, sex, education, and largely across age. The findings support the six-faceted theory of curiosity and show that 5DCR/6DNS is the first curiosity inventory that allows an assessment of a multifaceted curiosity across cultures and for heterogeneous samples.
... Therefore, individuals cannot be expected to report information that is not available to their awareness. Since the information and responses are prone to be ignored and distorted in self-assessments, various experimental paradigms have been developed for the study of consciousness (Galić, Bubić, and Kovačić 2016). Self-reports seem to be unable to measure subconscious processes. ...
For many years, conflict of interest has been a topic of debate in professional ethics, whereby the performance of a professional obligation can be potentially affected by a financial or non-financial interest. However, studies on conflict of interest often do not include cognitive perspectives. In this study, it was hypothesized that conflict of interest might shape the perception of the situation in a subconscious manner. To test the hypothesis, we have designed an experiment using one of the well-known empirical paradigms of consciousness studies—the masking paradigm. In three experimental conditions (i.e., conflict of interest, neutral, and alignment of interest), participants were exposed to several subliminal visual stimuli in a series of trials. Results show that interest can have a direct impact on subconscious processes and subsequently perception in such a way that alignment of interest is accompanied by increasing the probability of correct perception, and conflict of interest would lead to more wrong perception. Finally, some of the impacts of this cognitive bias on scientific observation, data management, and underdetermination resolution are investigated.
BACKGROUND: Obtaining reliable data under explicit evaluations is one of the most complicated challenges in assessing drug users' status. Respondents are likely to give answers that are to their advantage or deliberately deceitful. Regarding drug use, intense and inevitable drug craving is known as one of the main causes of relapse and treatment failure. As a matter of fact, drug craving is directly correlated to attentional bias toward drug-related stimuli, while drug-related stimuli capture drug users' attention as a result of craving. Most methods for studying selective attention and attentional bias have been developed for visual modality. However, stimuli that capture drug users’ attention are not always visual, they could be auditory.
AIMS: We examined if a modified word recognition dichotic listening task discriminated between methamphetamine users and non-users. Moreover, we investigated further the reliability and validity of this new paradigm.
METHODS: A total of 30 adult males participated in the study (15 methamphetamine users and 15 non-users). The word recognition dichotic listening task included two stimuli narratives/sequences (one neutral and one methamphetamine-related) that were presented simultaneously via headphones, one stimuli sequence to each ear. The participants were instructed to only pay attention to the neutral stimuli and to ignore the drug-related stimuli. Afterward, participants were asked to indicate in a list which words they recognized from the listening task and responded to the Desire for Drug Questionnaire, which was modified to address methamphetamine craving. In addition, a month after the experiment, we assessed therapy adherence among participants who were methamphetamine users.
RESULTS: Methamphetamine users had a significantly lower performance in the word recognition dichotic task compared to non-users (t = 4.30, p < .001; Cohen’s d = 6.13). Importantly, the average performance on the task was significantly higher among methamphetamine users who continued their treatment one month later compared to those who quitted (t = −2.56, p < .05; Hedges' g = 1.28). Moreover, the intraclass correlation coefficient with 95% interval confidence for the word recognition dichotic listening task scores was excellent (ICC = 0.90) and the scores were significantly correlated with self-reported methamphetamine craving (r = −.47, p < .001).
CONCLUSIONS: The modified word recognition dichotic listening task successfully discriminated between individuals who craved methamphetamine from those who did not. This new paradigm demonstrated high reliability and validity in the present pilot study. Due to the importance of preventing unreliable responses when assessing drug cravings, the current method can be, after further validation, utilized in both research and clinical practices.
The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) provides a flexible measure of the automatic associations underlying implicit prejudice. Results of three experiments showed strong evidence of implicit prejudices based on religious ethnicity (Jewish vs. Christian), age (young vs. old), and nationality (American vs. Soviet). Subjects responded more rapidly to tasks that obliged association of ingroup tokens to pleasant attributes and outgroup tokens to unpleasant attributes than to ones that obliged the complementary associations. In addition, the findings of three experiments were consistent with the hypothesis that IAT effects are independent of self-reported stimulus familiarity differences. These results support the construct validity and the generality of the IAT method in implicit prejudice research.
The Conditional Reasoning Test for Aggression (CRT-A) is based on the idea that aggressive individuals use motive-based cognitive biases to see their behavior as reasonable and that those biases can be measured with inductive reasoning tasks. Although the initial validation efforts for the CRT-A in the United States have been reasonably successful, there has been no attempt to determine if the evidence of validity and reliability generalizes to other cultural contexts. In this paper, we describe four studies designed to systematically accumulate validity evidence for the CRT-A using Croatian participants. Our analyses revealed that the Croatian adaptation of the CRT-A yielded psychometric characteristics that were similar to those obtained on the US samples (Study 1). CRT-A scores that predicted counterproductive work behaviors occurrence beyond self-reported personality (Study 2) were independent from general mental ability as measured with an abstract reasoning test (Study 3), and not susceptible to faking (Study 4).
Recent interest in the implicit self-esteem construct has led to the creation and use of several new assessment tools whose psychometric properties have not been fully explored. In this article, the authors investigated the reliability and validity of seven implicit self-esteem measures. The different implicit measures did not correlate with each other, and they correlated only weakly with measures of explicit self-esteem. Only some of the implicit measures demonstrated good test–retest reliabilities, and overall, the implicit measures were limited in their ability to predict our criterion variables. Finally, there was some evidence that implicit self-esteem measures are sensitive to context. The implications of these findings for the future of implicit self-esteem research are discussed.
Experiment 1 used the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, Be J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998) to measure self-esteem by assessing automatic associations of self with positive or negative valence. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that two IAT measures defined a factor that was distinct from, but weakly correlated with, a factor defined by standard explicit (self-report) measures of self-esteem. Experiment 2 tested known-groups validity of two IAT gender self-concept measures. Compared with well-established explicit measures, the IAT measures revealed triple the difference in measured masculinity-femininity between men and women. Again, CFA revealed construct divergence between implicit and explicit measures. Experiment 3 assessed the self-esteem IAT's validity in predicting cognitive reactions to success and failure. High implicit self-esteem was associated in the predicted fashion with buffering against adverse effects of failure on two of four measures.
The Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) was adapted to assess the automatically activated (implicit) self-concept of aggressiveness. In three studies the validity of the Aggressiveness-IAT (Agg-IAT) was supported by substantial correlations with self-report measures of aggressiveness. After controlling for self-report measures of aggressiveness, the Agg-IAT accounted for 9 to 15 percent of the variance of three different indicators of aggressive behavior across three studies. To further explore the nomological network around the Agg-IAT we investigated its correlations with measures of social desirability (SD). Although not fully conclusive, the results across four studies provided some support for a weak negative correlation between impression management SD and aggressive behavior as well as the Agg-IAT. This result is in line with an interpersonally oriented self-control account of impression management SD. Individuals with high SD scores seem to behave less aggressively, and to show lower Agg-IAT scores. The one-week stability of the Agg-IAT was r = .58 in Study 4.
College students, especially women, demonstrated negativity toward math and science relative to arts and language on implicit measures. Group membership (being female), group identity (self = female), and gender stereotypes (math = male) were related to attitudes and identification with mathematics. Stronger implicit math = male stereotypes corresponded with more negative implicit and explicit math attitudes for women but more positive attitudes for men. Associating the self with female and math with male made it difficult for women, even women who had selected math-intensive majors, to associate math with the self. These results point to the opportunities and constraints on personal preferences that derive from membership in social groups.
Conditional reasoning tests (CRT) were proposed as an innovative approach to implicitly measure the rationalizations toward counterproductive work behaviors (CWB) often associated with overt integrity tests. The authors first set out to map a typology of justification mechanisms for general CWB, and to then validate a new integrity-based CRT in both honest and faking testing conditions. Unfortunately, while demonstrating encouraging construct and criterion validity in the honest testing condition, the test was less resistant to faking than originally anticipated, and ceased to be valid in the faking condition. Overall, the results provide theoretical insight toward understanding how employees justify CWB, but raise concerns regarding the potential operational limitations of at least some CRTs.
Conditional reasoning (CR) is a new item format that measures personality by indirectly assessing reliance upon the cognitive biases associated with specific traits (James et al., 2005). Previous research suggests that, relative to self-report measures, responses on CR-based measures are more difficult to distort (LeBreton, Barksdale, Robin, & James, 2007). The issue of response distortion in the context of CR-based measures was evaluated in two studies. Study 1 (within-subjects) and Study 2 (between-subjects) both investigated whether responses on a CR-based test of addiction could be faked when indirect assessment was upheld. Results of both studies indicated that, unlike a self-report measure of a similar construct, the CR-based measure was unaffected by response distortion. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.