Do smokers have a negative implicit attitude toward smoking?

Abstract

Swanson, Rudman, and Greenwald (2001) used an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure attitudes toward smoking and found that smokers have negative implicit attitudes toward smoking. In a first experiment, we replicated the results of Swanson et al. but showed that scores on an attitude IAT do discriminate between smokers and nonsmokers to the same extent than scores on an IAT that is designed to measure associations between smoking and approach or avoidance. In a second experiment, we did find positive implicit attitudes toward smoking in smokers when we used a personalised version of the IAT that was designed to be less susceptible to effects of societal views. Our results indicate that implicit attitudes should not be dismissed as a causal factor in the maintenance of smoking behaviour.

Acknowledgments

We thank Steven Sherman and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.