The Brief Implicit Association Test is Valid: Experimental Evidence

As a new variant of Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT; Sriram & Greenwald, 2009) has been shown to be useful in predicting various behaviors. This research aims to examine experimental validity of the BIAT. Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the BIAT was sensitive to implicit favoritism toward and identification with a newly established ingroup by memorization procedure, a minimal group induction procedure (Pinter & Greenwald, 2011). Experiment 2 showed that the BIAT was responsive to the threat effect on intergroup attitudes and further predictive of resultant intention to boycott outgroup. Moreover, mediation analysis showed that the change in implicit favoritism revealed by BIAT partially explained changes in the intention to boycott. These findings suggest that BIAT is not only sensitive to newly formed associations but also to the change of an existing association.