Publications

Ethnocentrism – the tendency for prejudice to be a general tendency – is typically assumed to encompass attitudes toward groups that are not one’s own. The current work explored the span and roots of implicit ethnocentrism. Using a measure of automatic intergroup attitudes, we tested across attitude domains that are divergent (broad-span) – and therefore unlikely to be related – as a strong test of implicit ethnocentrism. A pilot Study 1 revealed surprisingly strong connections among implicit university and ethnic attitudes. Moreover, in Study 2, university, ethnic, and national attitudes coalesced, suggesting that ethnocentrism has a broader span than previously recognized, and encompasses attitudes that, on the surface, seem to be conceptually distinct. In contrast, explicit ethnocentrism took the classic narrower form, showing consistency across a circumscribed range of groups. Additionally, a positive implicit self attitude partially accounted for implicit ethnocentrism, suggesting that the common root of self-esteem acts as a kind of “social glue” to attitudinally bind seemingly distant groups and to reveal a broader spanning ethnocentrism than previously recognized.

Reproducibility is a defining feature of science, but the extent to which it characterizes current research is unknown. We conducted replications of 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals using high-powered designs and original materials when available. Replication effects were half the magnitude of original effects, representing a substantial decline. Ninety-seven percent of original studies had statistically significant results. Thirty-six percent of replications had statistically significant results; 47% of original effect sizes were in the 95% confidence interval of the replication effect size; 39% of effects were subjectively rated to have replicated the original result; and if no bias in original results is assumed, combining original and replication results left 68% with statistically significant effects. Correlational tests suggest that replication success was better predicted by the strength of original evidence than by characteristics of the original and replication teams.

In this chapter, we first briefly review why replications are highly valued but rarely published. Then we describe a collaborative effort—the Reproducibility Project—to estimate the rate and predictors of reproducibility in psychological science. Finally, we detail how we are conducting this project as a large-scale, distributed, open collaboration. A description of the procedures and challenges may assist and inspire other teams to conduct similar projects in other areas of science.

Reproducibility is a defining feature of science. However, because of strong incentives for innovation and weak incentives for confirmation, direct replication is rarely practiced or published. The Reproducibility Project is an open, large-scale, collaborative effort to systematically examine the rate and predictors of reproducibility in psychological science. So far, 72 volunteer researchers from 41 institutions have organized to openly and transparently replicate studies published in three prominent psychological journals in 2008. Multiple methods will be used to evaluate the findings, calculate an empirical rate of replication, and investigate factors that predict reproducibility. Whatever the result, a better understanding of reproducibility will ultimately improve confidence in scientific methodology and findings.

This article considers Gunderson et al.’s (2011) analysis of the intergenerational transmission of mathematics attitudes in light of broader knowledge about the nature of attitudes. It makes two primary points. First, many of the constructs that Gunderson et al. include under the umbrella of “attitude” are theoretically and psychometrically distinct. Researchers who follow the agenda laid out by Gunderson et al. should take care to carefully define their constructs. Second, using the literature on the intergenerational transmission of implicit attitudes as a starting point, this commentary explores specific ways in which children’s mathematics attitudes may arise as a function of their parents’ and teachers’ attitudes.

While the gender gap in mathematics and science has narrowed, men pursue these fields at a higher rate than women. In this study, 165 men and women at a university in the northeastern United States completed implicit and explicit measures of science stereotypes (association between male and science, relative to female and humanities), and gender identity (association between the concept “self” and one’s own gender, relative to the concept “other” and the other gender), and reported plans to pursue science-oriented and humanities-oriented academic programs and careers. Although men were more likely than women to plan to pursue science, this gap in students’ intentions was completely accounted for by implicit stereotypes. Moreover, implicit gender identity moderated the relationship between women’s stereotypes and their academic plans, such that implicit stereotypes only predicted plans for women who strongly implicitly identified as female. These findings illustrate how an understanding of implicit cognitions can illuminate between-group disparities as well as within-group variability in science pursuit.

This chapter discusses questions of racial bias and political ideology in the context of Barack Obama's 2008 historical election and the first year of his presidency. In contrast to various claims that his election signifies that racial bias in the United States has vanished, social scientific evidence demonstrates that ours has yet to become a "post-racial" society. Unfortunately, implicit (i.e., uncontrollable and relatively less conscious) racial negativity toward African Americans remains robust and pervasive. Moreover, both implicit and explicit racial bias played a significant role in the 2008 election and reactions to Obama's first year in office. The evidence to date fails to support the notion that Obama's presidency has reduced aggregate levels of implicit racial bias. Ironically, some experimental studies suggest that circumstances for African Americans could worsen to the extent that Obama's election encourages people to dismiss evidence of racial discrimination and lessen their commitment to egalitarian goals.

Once upon a time, the central civil rights questions were indisputably normative. What did "equal justice under law" require? Did it, for example, permit segregation, or was separate never equal? This is no longer the case. Today, the central civil rights questions of our time turn also on the underlying empirics. In a post-civil rights era, in what some people exuberantly embrace as post-racial, many assume that we already live in a colorblind society. Is this in fact the case? Recent findings about implicit bias from mind scientists sharply suggest otherwise. This Article summarizes the empirical evidence that rejects facile claims of perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral colorblindness. It then calls on the law to take a "behaviorally realist" account of these findings, and maps systematically how it might do so in sensible, non-hysterical, and evidence-based ways. Recognizing that this call may be politically naive, the Article examines and answers three objections, sounding in "junk science" backlash, "hard-wired" resignation, and "rational" justification.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) is a frequently used measure of implicit cognitions that is typically administered on computers. This chapter reports development of an IAT that can be administered on paper. First, it describes a suggested analytic procedure for paper IAT data. Next, two studies measuring implicit racial preferences are reported that suggest that the paper-format IAT elicits similar but somewhat weaker mean effects than the computer-format IAT, and shows test-retest reliability comparable to the computer-format IAT. The paper format IAT may be more sensitive to the type of stimuli used in the task. It performed better with all-verbal stimuli compared with pictures of faces. Use of the paper-format IAT with verbal stimuli may be a useful supplement to computerized data collections, or a viable approach when computer data collection is not feasible.

Experimental psychology has provided substantial evidence that the human mind can operate in automatic, uncontrollable fashion as well as without conscious awareness of its workings and the sources of influence on it. With methods available to measure implicit or less conscious aspects of social cognition, especially group-specific attitudes and stereotypes, several aspects of the nature of implicit social cognition are now regarded as well established. Such results primarily include the pervasive and robust implicit favoritism for one's own groups and socially dominant groups, the dissociation between implicit and explicit social cognition, the ability of both to predict behavior, the greater impact of the former on certain discriminatory behavi ors, and the sensitivity of seemingly implicit thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to change in response to situational features and experience. Legal scholarship and judicial opinions are beginning to consider how the law can and should adapt to such findings, in particular how they call into question existing assumptions regarding the notion of intent, and their relevance for antidiscrimination law.

Time as the variable to estimate the nature of mental computation underlies dozens of methods: the Stroop task, episodic or repetition priming, semantic priming, evaluation priming, and many others to assess attention, perception, memory and categorization. We focus on one such measure, the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), which provides an estimate of the strength of association between concepts and attributes, much like the semantic priming measure does (see case 2007-01388-002, Wittenbrink, Chapter 2, this volume). In the 9 years since its publication, the IAT method has received significant attention. At present, more than 200 papers report use of the method, hundreds of conference papers have been delivered, and more than 4.5 million tests have been taken at www.implicit.harvard.edu. In addition, a healthy skepticism about what the method is and does has produced commentaries on interpretation (see Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, in press, for a review). Specific reports of interest to readers include those that summarize results obtained using the IAT (Carney, Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, in press; Greenwald & Nosek, 2001; Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002a; Nosek et al., in press), provide details on method and scoring development (Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003; Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2005), and discuss the unique nature of reactions to the IAT (Banaji, 2001). In addition, stimulus materials and sample programs are available via web sites. With these resources already available, this chapter focuses on an aspect of the work that is currently unavailable in a single location--a brief introduction to those who are new to the IAT and wish to become educated users of the technique and consumers of research that uses it. If successful, the chapter will provide a user-friendly guide to the IAT.

Yale undergraduates implicitly preferred their university to a competitor. However, implicit preferences for smaller residential colleges (RCs) within the university reflected the status of the RC in the local culture, despite the fact that RC membership was randomly assigned. Consistent with system justification theory, members of lower-status RCs showed depressed implicit ingroup preference. Implicit cognitions related to university adhered to principles of balanced cognitive consistency. However, implicit cognitions related to residential colleges did not show cognitive consistency. These data suggest that although group membership predisposes one to favor the ingroup, implicit ingroup preferences can be attenuated when the ingroup is not culturally valued. Moreover, differences in group status can disrupt the tendency to maintain consistency among self- and group-related cognitions.

In this report, we review research that shows such a pattern [for group status to moderate the strength of ingroup liking]. Groups with relatively equal status show strong and equal implicit liking for their own group. However, as the evaluative status of groups vary, so do patterns of ingroup attitudes among their members. Members of evaluatively high-status groups do show positive implicit and explicit attitudes toward their ingroup. The story is more complex for members of low-status groups – in all of the work reviewed here, members of evaluatively low-status groups may explicitly report liking (even strong liking) for their group that is not mirrored on the implicit measure of ingroup affect. Occasionally, members of such groups even exhibit outgroup preference.