Page 174 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms

Chapter 7
2009). As such, it remains crucial to choose stimuli that reflect the same superordinate category that one is interested in as much as possible (Lane et al., 2007), but also to include several different stimuli (Nosek et al., 2005) as we aimed to do in our study.
Discriminant validity
Both the PIAT and WIAT do not correlate with the explicit measure of inter-ethnic bias (the symbolic racism scale, or SRS), which suggests that IATs tap into a different kind of cognitive constructs than explicit biases. Indeed, this is the reason why IATs exist in the first place, namely to show that views and attitudes are partially driven by unconscious mechanisms (Greenwald et al., 2002). At the same time, we did not find high antipathy scores against individuals of Moroccan descent, which could for instance reflect that a) our participants indeed do not consciously view individuals of Moroccan descent as more negatively than individuals of Dutch descent, or b) participants answer in a socially desirable way, which can be true especially in case of a highly sensitive topic such as ethnic prejudice (Fazio & Olson, 2003). In the current study we cannot directly dissociate between these explanations, but a meta-analysis on the correlation between implicit and explicit measures of attitudes showed that correlations between implicit and explicit measures may be low when participants make their judgments deliberately or spontaneously. For instance, it takes more cognitive effort when asked to reflect on your evaluations of individuals with differing backgrounds than whether you are asked about more mundane things such as attitudes towards fruits and candies; in the latter case, correlations between explicit an implicit measures are higher (Hofmann et al., 2005) .
In general, IATs that find ethnicity biases do indeed report negative correlations between IAT effects and explicit biases, and our results are in line with these findings. Furthermore, the notion that the PIAT indeed uncovers implicit biases is supported by the fact that the Symbolic 2000 Racism Scale questionnaire, which primes participants to think more deeply about their inter-ethnic biases, did not seem to affect subsequent IAT effects. For further discussions on the correlations between explicitly and implicitly assessed attitudes we refer to the meta-analysis by Hofmann et al. (2005).
PIAT performance compared to the WIAT
In Experiment 2 we show that the PIAT performs similarly to a word-IAT, and that the test-retest reliability of the IAT measures was good. This is interesting considering the persistent debate on the relatively large range of test-retest reliability scores of the IAT (Lane et al., 2007). The benefit of a PIAT over IATs that use words or spoken
172