It’s Brief But Is It Better? An Evaluation of the Brief Implicit Association Test

Sriram and Greenwald (2009) introduced a new variant of the Implicit Association Test, which they termed the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT). The BIAT differs from a standard IAT by using less trials and by instructing participants to focus on only two of the four categories in each block. We argue that the focus manipulation of the BIAT does not suffice to fully control for focusing and recoding processes in the task. Compatibility effects in the BIAT are therefore still subject to influences that are unrelated to the conceptual relation between the target and attribute categories of the task (e.g., salience asymmetries and stimulus-based effects). Highlighting these nonassociative influences, findings with the BIAT revealed strong asymmetries in compatibility effects, reliability, and convergent validity, depending on which of the two attribute categories was selected as a focal category in the BIAT. To eliminate these problems, we recommend the use of other, recently developed variants of the IAT that prevent recoding effects by eliminating the dual-block structure of the task.