A Comparative Investigation of the Predictive Validity of Four Indirect Measures of Bias and Prejudice

While measures of implicit associations are influential in the prejudice literature, comparative tests of the predictive power of these measures are lacking. A large-scale (N > 100,000) analysis of four commonly-used measures — the Implicit Association Test (IAT), Single-Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT), evaluative priming task (EPT), and Sorting Paired Features task (SPF) — across ten intergroup domains and 250 outcomes found clear evidence for the superiority of the SC-IAT in predictive and incremental predictive validity. Follow-up analyses suggested that the SC-IAT benefitted from an exclusive focus on associations towards stigmatized group members, as associations towards non-stigmatized group members diluted the predictive strength of relative measures like the IAT, SPF, and EPT. These results highlight how conclusions about predictive validity can vary drastically depending on the measure selected, and reveal novel insights about the value of different measures when focusing on predictive than convergent validity.