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.
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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, Citation2008). 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 (Citation1989) selfish genes.
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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.