What underlies death/suicide implicit association test measures and how it contributes to suicidal action

ABSTRACT

Recently, psychologists have developed indirect measurement procedures to predict suicidal behavior. A prominent example is the Death/Suicide Implicit Association Test (DS-IAT). In this paper, I argue that there is something special about the DS-IAT which distinguishes it from different IAT measures. I argue that the DS-IAT does not measure weak or strong associations between the implicit self-concept and the abstract concept of death. In contrast, assuming a goal-system approach, I suggest that sorting death-related to self-related words takes effort because death-related words trigger avoidance-impulses, which suicide ideation weakens. The DS-IAT taps into weakened automatic responses from the self-preservation system. Additionally, the suggested cognitive structure, illuminated with the selfish-goal theory, explains predictable suicidal behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Suicidology
• implicit bias
• agency
• self-control
• selfish goal theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I think that implicit cognition only plays a crucial role for some types of suicidal agents.

2. An individual who considers suicide counts as a suicide ideator.

3. One of the strongest risk factors are past suicidal attempts, but the SI-IAT outruns this risk factor. This makes it implausible that the SI-IAT does simply measure the memory-traces of past suicidal attempts.

4. I am open to the idea that goal-systems use different underlying mechanisms than associations.

5. Arguably, when agents are undergoing a classic IAT measure, similar mechanisms are at play. For instance, if participants are hungry, it is harder for them to sort food-related words to the value-label bad (Stafford & Scheffler, 2008). The goal to eat, here a motivation that gained power, influences the participants’ IAT performance, which seems unexplainable with memory’s associations between food and value-based concepts.

6. The idea of selfish goals is an analogy to Dawkins’s (1989) selfish genes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

René Baston

René Baston finished his PhD studies on the nature of implicit prejudices in 2019. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany.