The Power of Implicit Associations Test in Measuring Indirect Social Attitudes: Can IAT be used for indirect assessment of attitudes?

The purpose of this research is to ascertain whether or not implicit association test (IAT) can measure indirect attitudes. Implicit association test (IAT) is a computer based experimental method within social psychology designed to measure indirect attitudes. It has been endeavored in this experiment, which is conducted on an Iranian sample with a different subject, to study the reliability of this test and to compare its results with those of explicit attitude measure. For this purpose, 24 undergraduate psychology students were selected randomly and IAT as well as 3 explicit attitude scales were used to measure their attitude to the IQ status of governmental and open university students. Data were analyzed with Cronbach's Alpha (a), Pearson correlation coefficient (r), independent test, and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results showed that IAT expected reliability was (a = 0/84). On the other hand, despite high correlation between explicit scales, correlations between implicit and explicit scales were low. This research, while demonstrating the usefulness of IAT test in measuring implicit social attitudes, proposes the probability of differences in structures that were measured with implicit and explicit scales.