Expanding the Scope of Implicit Personality Assessment: An Examination of the Questionnaire-Based Implicit Association Test (qIAT)

Abstract

Self-report questionnaires can only yield information that people are able and willing to report, but implicit assessment methods are not commonly used in mainstream personality research. The Questionnaire-based Implicit Association Test (qIAT) was designed to address the limitations associated with the conventional self-concept IAT, and it enables an indirect assessment that is based on the items of standard self-reports. The present studies examined the psychometric properties of the qIAT across two personality constructs. Study 1 (N = 528) provided support for the internal consistency, test-retest reliability and convergent and discriminant validity of the qIAT that measured extraversion. Study 2 (N = 164) supported the reliability and validity of the qIAT assessment of conscientiousness, which predicted who returned to complete the second session of the study two weeks later, for which participants were paid in advance. This same prediction effect was marginally significant in Study 3 (N = 200), and across both Studies 2 and 3 the qIAT prediction of the criterion behavior was incremental to the parallel self-report questionnaire. Taken together, findings support the reliability and validity of the qIAT, which enables the indirect measurement of a wide variety of distinct personality constructs, currently measured only by self-report scales.

Keywords:

• Implicit personality assessment
• extraversion
• conscientiousness
• questionnaire-based implicit association test

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Gidi Aviram, Ruti Mayo, Tali Kleiman, and Yarden Weis for their helpful comments. This research was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation Grant 886/18 to Iftah Yovel.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/z52mw/, https://osf.io/z52mw/ and https://osf.io/z52mw/.

Notes

1 Measures, data, data processing codes and analysis syntax of the present studies are openly available as supplementary materials at osf.io/z52mw/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation Grant 886/18 to Iftah Yovel.