Summary of "No Implicit-Explicit Racial Attitude Correlation in a White Sample from the rural South of the United States"

Note: This was first published on March 5, 2020.

Steve Haase and I recently published No Implicit-Explicit Racial Attitude Correlation in a White Sample from the rural South of the United States in the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis. Here's a quick overview of the paper.

A consistent finding since the introduction of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is that it correlates only weakly with explicit attitudes. The reason for the lack of a relationship is unclear. An early interpretation was that the near zero relationship is a sign of unconscious processing. There are other possibilities though, perhaps technical in nature.

We hypothesized that a larger implicit-explicit correlation could be found if the explicit attitudes were more extreme. A sample of white participants was collected from the rural South of the United States, a region with a history of black prejudice. They were tested on the Modern Racism Scale (MRS; explicit attitude) and a race IAT. The MRS scores were higher than a comparable sample from Pennsylvania, but this did not lead to a strong MRS-IAT correlation. The lack of an implicit-explicit relationship does not seem to be attributable to a restriction of range effect.

We thank Stephen Reysen (the editor) and the reviewers for being open to publishing research that does not reach the traditional criterion for statistical significance.