The Implicit Associations Test (IAT) created by Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz (1998) measures reaction times in compatible versus incompatible blocks. The underlying idea is that you should be quicker to categorise words when closely related items share the same response key, i.e. a faster performance in compatible blocks suggests that the evaluation made by the participant is consistent with the stereotype being measured. A standard IAT consists of 5 blocks – the first 2 blocks are practice blocks, where, if measuring racism for example, the participant would categorise the images into black or white faces by pressing certain keys. This is the initial target-concept discrimination. They would then categorise words into good and bad words, which is the initial attribute discrimination. In the third block, the first two practice tasks are combined with the same key assignments, and this is the initial combined task. The fourth block is almost the same as the first, but the key assignment is reversed. This is the reversed target-concept discrimination task. The fifth and final block combines the two categorisation tasks, but the key assignments from the first and second block are reversed – aptly named the reversed combined task. The general finding is that participants respond slower to incompatible blocks. Quick and accurate responses are facilitated when the key assignments combine concepts that are strongly associated in memory.

There are many advantages of using the IAT to assess implicit attitudes. The IAT’s popularity is partly due to its satisfactory psychometric properties (Tiege-Mocigemba et al. 2010), so much so that the IAT’s reliability estimates are comparable to self-report scores (Gawronski and De Houwer, 2014), meaning that results gathered from either can be compared with each other. The flexibility of the IAT is to be admired – it can be used to compare the relation between any two concepts, making it a very useful indirect measure. Variants of the IAT also make it possible to assess associations of a single concept rather than relative associations of two concepts (Karpinski and Steinman, 2006) which means that it has an even wider applicability, making it more likely to be a psychologists’ first choice. It also has high reliability (ranging from .70-.90; Gawronski and De Houwer, 2014), making it an optimum choice for assessing implicit attitudes.

However, there are also a number of limitations with using the IAT. For example, it has been found that participants can be instructed to fake their scores (e.g. De Houwer, Beckers and Moors, 2007), suggesting that this measure is susceptible to manipulation, making it less reliable than it first appears. The metric that the IAT is sc