Interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has stimulated many research investigations. Much of this research has used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure association strengths that are presumed to underlie implicit biases. It had been more than a decade since the last published treatment of recommended best practices for research using IAT measures. After an initial draft by the first author, and continuing through three subsequent drafts, the 22 authors and 14 commenters contributed extensively to refining the selection and description of recommendation-worthy research practices. Individual judgments of agreement or disagreement were provided by 29 of the 36 authors and commenters. Of the 21 recommended practices for conducting research with IAT measures presented in this article, all but two were endorsed by 90% or more of those who felt knowledgeable enough to express agreement or disagreement; only 4% of the totality of judgments expressed disagreement. For two practices that were retained despite more than two judgments of disagreement (four for one, five for the other), the bases for those disagreements are described in presenting the recommendations. The article additionally provides recommendations for how to report procedures of IAT measures in empirical articles.

[Version 3 (uploaded 21 April 2020) provides corrected list of co-authors and commenters; the ms. is otherwise unchanged from Versions 1 and 2.] Scientific interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has produced a large corpus of empirical findings. In addition to much evidence for validity and usefulness of Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures, there have been psychological critiques of empirical findings and theoretical disagreements about interpretation of IAT findings. Because of public attention drawn by the concept of implicit bias, commercial and other applications based on the concept of implicit bias have been developed by non-psychologists—some of these applications are not appropriately guided by the existing body of research findings. This article is in 5 parts: (1) review of best practices for research use of IAT measures, (2) summary of what has been confidently learned from empirical research using IAT measures, (3) accepted and controversial theoretical interpretations of IAT findings, (4) significant questions about the IAT and implicit bias that still await answer, and (5) questions arising in attempts to apply research findings to remedy unintended discrimination due to implicit biases.

Goals and policies 2 Research on judgment and decision making has often focused on the rules people use to make choices and the information used in decision making at the expense of the prediction of what people like and dislike. For example, much of the heuristics and biases literature examined strategies people used when making choices such as satisficing 1972). As another example, studies have examined people's tendency to focus their choices on information that matches across a set of options rather than on properties that Research on consumer behavior can ill-afford to focus only on choice strategies and information processing. In order to understand consumption behavior and factors that influence purchase decisions, it is important to understand the constituents of preference and action. Central to this enterprise is a focus on the motivational processes that drive attitudes and purchases. For this reason, consumer behavior has benefited from an upsurge in research on the influence of motivation on cognitive processes (Brendl & There have been many proposals for the structure of the goal and motivational it has proven difficult to provide evidence for specific proposals about the relationship Goals and policies 3 between goals and motivation, because key aspects of the motivational system are not consciously accessible. Happily, there is quite a bit of data that bears on the structure of the motivational system, and from this work, it is possible to extract a good working framework that can be used to drive further research. In this chapter, we outline such a framework that draws on past research. We begin by sketching nine empirical phenomena that constrain a theory of goal systems. Then, we present a framework for thinking about goals and motivation. We use this framework to suggest new lines of research, and sketch some of our recent work that addresses these questions. Phenomena that constrain an account of goals Goals and motivations are key terms that are used quite broadly within the Psychology literature. Motivation is typically used to refer to the impetus to perform an action, while goal is typically used to refer to an outcome that an agent has a tendency to work toward bringing about (i.e., to approach) or to keep from occurring (i.e., to avoid). Agents (people, animals, perhaps autonomous systems like robots) also have objects and strategies that can be used to fulfill their goals. These objects and strategies are called the means …

This section presents abstracts of three studies on how consumer choices can be influenced by the name letter effect of brands without decision makers being aware of this influence. The first paper examined whether making brand names similar to consumers' names increases the likelihood that consumers will choose the brand. One prediction is that people will prefer and be more likely to choose products or services whose names prominently feature the letters in their own first or last names. The results showed that subjects' preference rankings and evaluations of name letter matching brands were higher than those of non-name letter matching brands. The second paper tested the possibility of using subliminal priming to activate a concept that a persuasive communicator could take advantage of. To examine the idea, two experiments were presented. In the first experiment, participants' level of thirst were manipulated and then subliminally presented them with either thirst-related words or control words. While the manipulations had no effect on participants' self-reported, conscious ratings of thirst, there was a significant interactive effect of the two factors on how much of the drink provided in the taste test was consumed. In a second, follow up experiment, thirsty participants were subliminally presented with either thirst-related words or control words after which they viewed advertisements for two new sports beverages. In conclusion, the research demonstrates that under certain conditions, subliminal printing techniques can enhance persuasion. The third paper hypothesized that the lack of correlations between implicit and explicit evaluations is due to measurement error.

Most theories of social cognition share the assumption that the basic modules from which behavior emerges are mental representations. Consequently, much research has focused on the properties of individual mental representations, such as their level of activation (accessibility) or the degree to which they share associations with other representations. The current chapter discusses another fundamental principle involving mental representations. The relations between different mental representations may be as important for the prediction of behavior as the property of each single mental representation. This chapter hypothesizes that goals may play a central role in determining these relations. Consider Example (a):In this example, stimulus and response correspond by both being on the right side; as a result, the response is facilitated compared to them being on opposite sides. More generally, compatibility compared with incompatibility between side of stimulus and side of response facilitates responding. As is suggested in greater detail later, the following examples may also be instances of a more general principle of compatibility between stimuli and goals.

When making decisions, people group gains and losses. The way they choose to form these groupings, called "mental accounting" affects their decisions. Mental accounting is a powerful and intuitively compelling phenomenon. To this point, however, little attention has been devoted to the psychological principles that underlie mental accounting. In this article we explore the psychological processes that set up mental accounts and assign gains or losses to these accounts. We propose that (a) currently active goals set up mental accounts, and (b) gains and losses are weighted into these accounts proportionally to their representativeness to the goal that set up the account. We review existing evidence that supports this goals-representativeness view of mental accounting and describe new studies designed to test these proposals, We also review other choice phenomena (e.g., sunk costs and entrapment) in which mental accounting is involved. We suggest that mental accounting is a useful self-regulatory strategy, despite the fact that it can sometimes lead to irrational choices.

Individuals with varying levels of chronic accessibility for the construct "conceited" read about a target person and gave their spontaneous impressions of the target′s behaviors. The construct "conceited" was either contextually primed or not, and the priming-to-stimulus delay was either short or long. The stimulus behaviors also varied in applicability to the construct "conceited," with three different types of non-"unambiguous" stimuli being examined. The stimulus behaviors were either only weakly related to "conceited" (vague), strongly and equally related to both "conceited" and "self-confident" (ambiguous), or more strongly related to self-confident than to "conceited" (contrary). We found that the extremely vague target behaviors yielded conceited-related spontaneous impressions when the accessibility of the construct conceited was maximized - contextual priming [without awareness], short priming-to-stimulus delay, and relatively high levels of chronic accessibility. This result supports the "activation rule" that strong accessibility can compensate for weak applicability. Two other activation rules were suggested by the results for the ambiguous and the contrary stimuli, respectively: (a) higher accessibility can yield stronger judgments even when perceivers are aware of contextual priming events if the additional contribution to activation from applicability and chronic accessibility is sufficiently great, and (b) the relation between higher accessibility and stronger judgments is constrained when the applicability of a competing alternative construct is both strong and stronger than the target construct′s applicability.

Three studies psychophysically measured people's discrimination among different sizes of monetary net gains or net losses. Participants imagined either gains or nonlosses (i.e., net gains) or losses or nongains (i.e., net losses). Participants discriminated more when the identical event was framed as the presence (gains and losses) versus the absence (nonlosses and nongains) of an outcome, presumably because the latter is harder to represent. Discrimination was enhanced when the motivational features of the imagined event were either both the same as or both different from a person's self-discrepancy. Discrimination was reduced when only one of the motivational features was different. A model of excitations, inhibitions, and disinhibitions between mental representation is suggested to account for these findings.