attitude is strong, the activation of one concept automatically activates an evaluation; responding to a target stimulus should be faster to the extent that the prime and evaluative target are associated. A typical EP trial, in the example of racism, consists of briefly seeing a picture of a black or white person (the prime; e.g. 200ms) and then a blank screen for a short time (e.g. 50ms), and then a positive or negative word (the target). The objective is to press one key (e.g. S) if the target is positive, and another (e.g. K) if the word is negative – this is the evaluative decision task. There would be a stronger association between black and bad relative to white and good inferred if pictures of black people facilitate responding to negative words more than picture of white people facilitate responding to negative words. A number of variants of this implicit measure exist, but it’s recommended to instantiate the measure by presenting three blocks of 60 trials each (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton and Williams, 1995).

There are a number of reasons why a researcher might use the EP task. For example, the mechanisms and outcomes of the EP task have been studied more thoroughly than nearly any other measure, giving researchers detailed guidance in its use (e.g. De Houwer, Tiege-Mocigemba, Spruyt and Moors, 2009), meaning that researchers know how to get the most reliable results, making this a key measure. A major benefit of the EP is that researchers can calculate associations between different primes and target categories separately, as the use of a neutral baseline allows you to separately estimate associations between (in the context of racism) black and good, black and bad, white and good, and white and bad. Therefore, it allows researchers to calculate separate priming scores for different kinds of associations that are confounded in the IAT (Wittenbrink, 2007), making this measure more useful than the IAT as it gives more information.