Validity 1 Running head : IAT VALIDITY Is the IAT Sensitive to Personal

Three experiments tested whether the Implicit Association Test (IAT) reflects general knowledge, or whether it is sensitive to personally endorsed attitudes. In Experiment 1, participants learned to associate positive or negative attributes with two novel groups. Participants in one condition were told that the attributes accurately described the groups; in a second condition, they were told that the attributes did not describe the groups. Participants were then given an IAT and an explicit measure testing attitudes towards the two novel groups. When the participants were told the attributes were accurate, their IAT performances and explicit measure responses indicated a preference for the more positively described group; when the attributes had been described as inaccurate, they demonstrated no preference on the IAT or the explicit measure. Experiment 2 replicated these results and included a measure that showed the attributes were learned for both groups. In Experiment 3, participants learned to associate the positive or negative attributes to novel groups or, in the non-endorsement condition, to associate those attributes, negated, to those groups. Explicit attitudes and the IAT showed preferences for groups associated with positive attributes in the endorsement condition, whereas both measures showed reversed preferences in the non-endorsement condition. The consistent findings across experiments imply that the IAT is sensitive to personal endorsement.