Indirect attitude measures evaluate implicit attitudes – they assess unconscious mental associations between different concepts, using participants’ performance on experimental paradigms, most often speed categorisation tests. They were created to overcome the shortcomings of direct measures, which are a way of assessing attitudes directly – that is, a participant reports their own attitudes consciously, for example through a self-report questionnaire. There are many different implicit attitude measures, and the purpose of this essay is to critically evaluate their usefulness.

Indirect attitude measures, such as the Implicit Associations Test, the Evaluative Priming Task and the Affect Misattribution Procedure were designed to overcome the problems with direct measures. There are many complications with using self-report methods to assess attitudes, all of which impact the reliability and validity of the results. For example, Paulhaus (1991) pointed out that self-reports are subject to social desirability and self-presentational concerns, as people can control their answers – this means they could give socially desirable responses to avoid trouble or embarrassment, causing the replicability of the results to be compromised. Direct measures are also susceptible to demand characteristics because the theme of the questions could give away the hypothesis, and participants could respond with what they think the researchers want to hear, rendering the results unreliable. Wilson and Dunn (2004) noted the limited ability of people to report their attitudes, as they may be unaware of their unconscious biases and associations. This would further hinder the results gathered as their reported attitudes may not reflect their true attitudes, impacting the validity of the measure. Schwartz (1999) stated that direct measures are notoriously sensitive to contextual factors that are unrelated to the attitude itself, for example who is asking the questions, what time of day it is, the temperature of the room and more. All of these factors could influence the results given by the participant. As you can see, direct measures have a lot of issues to overcome, all of which must be considered when using these measures.