Collaborative Research: Implicit Social Cognition

在正在进行的关于内隐社会认知的研究中，我们已经形成了这样一种观点，即作为社会行为基础的认知过程的重要组成部分(a)通常隐藏在行为人的意识或控制能力之外，因此，(b)超出了使用仅限于自我报告测量的方法进行有效调查的可能性。我们的研究成功地采用了几种间接的方法来揭示内隐刻板印象的运作。本项目的第一个目标是将内隐社会认知的研究扩展到内隐态度和内隐自尊的社会认知构念领域。现有的无意识社会认知测量（最突出的是语义启动测量）有一些明显的局限性。尽管这些测量方法在开发它们的实验室中得到了有效的使用，但它们(a)不容易出口到其他实验室，(b)没有产生足够大的效应量，无法成功地作为个体差异测量方法。我们之前由美国国家科学基金会资助的研究已经产生了一种新的程序（内隐联想测试，IAT），它已被证明是一种可靠、有效和敏感的衡量内隐社会认知个体差异的方法。当前项目的第二个目标是记录IAT方法的基本属性，并将其作为研究内隐社会认知的核心技术。这项研究将产生三种类型的理想产品：(a)在社会行为的心理调查中广泛有用的新措施，(b)对无意识认知参与社会行为的新理论见解，以及(c)在重要环境中的应用，如工作场所和学校，在这些环境中，未被识别的（即，隐性的）刻板印象和偏见干扰了理想的或生产性的行为。

In ongoing research concerning implicit social cognition we have developed the view that important components of the cognitive processes that underlie social actions are (a) ordinarily hidden from the actor's awareness or ability to control and, as a consequence, (b) beyond the possibility of effective investigation using methods that are limited to self-report measures. Our research has successfully employed several indirect measures to reveal the operation of implicit stereotypes. The first goal of this project is to extend these investigations of implicit social cognition to the domains of the social-cognitive constructs of implicit attitudes and implicit self-esteem. Existing measures of unconscious social cognition (most prominently semantic priming measures) have some notable limitations. Although these measures have been used effectively at laboratories in which they were developed, they (a) have not readily been exported to other laboratories and (b) have not yielded large enough effect sizes to succeed as individual difference measures. Our previous NSF-funded research has yielded a new procedure (the Implicit Association Test, IAT) that has been shown to provide a reliable, efficient, and sensitive measure of individual differences in implicit social cognition. The second goal of the current project is to document the basic properties of the IAT method and to develop its use as a core technique for investigating implicit social cognition. The research will yield three types of desirable products: (a) new measures that should be broadly useful in psychological investigations of social behavior, (b) new theoretical insights into the involvement of unconscious cognition in social behavior, and (c)applications in important settings, such as workplace and school, in which unrecognized (i.e., implicit) stereotypes and prejudices interfere with desirable or productive behavior.