Comparing a Nomothetic and Idiographic Approach to Implicit Social Cognition

As a conceptual matter, idiographic stimulus selection is purported to offer psychometric benefits for many measures, including implicit measures. Empirically, idiographic methods with the Implicit Association Test have not robustly demonstrated superiority to nomothetic methods, and to date no idiographic/nomothetic comparison has been conducted with the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP). The current study compared a nomothetic and idiographic approach to the assessment of social cognition with the IRAP. Two IRAPs were administered to 69 college undergraduates in counterbalanced order, one containing the names “Abraham Lincoln” and “Adolf Hitler” (nomothetic), and one containing the names of a self-reported “friend” and “enemy” (idiographic), along with a collection of positive and negative evaluative words. A number of relevant self-reports also were administered and counterbalanced across participants with respect to order of measures. Results revealed a group difference for one of the four IRAP trial-type D-scores, and the nomothetic condition exhibited higher estimates of internal consistency. Results also indicated order effects for internal consistency as well as unexpected IRAP effects with both conditions suggesting that response options may influence performance at the task. Future studies on the impact of response options as well as the differential ability of nomothetic and idiographic IRAPs to predict other behaviors of interest may provide important data about the impact of these procedural variables on the utility of the measure.