Analysis of 4 million IATs (2004-2016) shows American implicit attitudes toward race, skin tone, and sexuality became less biased over time, tracking cultural trends.

Evidence

Implicit Attitudes Can Change Over the Long Term (Association for Psychological Science)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: To what extent does environmental visual adaptation (e.g., living in extreme high- or low-chroma landscapes) shift an individual’s implicit cognitive associations between achromatic light and moral valence?; Using 4.4 million tests of implicit and explicit attitudes from U.S. internet respondents, implicit sexuality, race, and skin-tone attitudes decreased in bias over 2007-2016 and were forecast to continue declining toward neutrality. — Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes: I. Long-Term Change and Stability From 2007 to 2016; Implicit associations reflected in the IAT are influenced by societal messages, life experiences, context, and other environmental factors. — About the IAT – Project Implicit

Related

• Using 4.4 million tests of implicit and explicit attitudes from U.S. internet respondents, implicit sexuality, race, and skin-tone attitudes decreased in bias over 2007-2016 and were forecast to… (similarity 0.97)
• Implicit associations reflected in the IAT are influenced by societal messages, life experiences, context, and other environmental factors. (similarity 0.90)
• IAT scores fluctuate with one’s current context and are better measures of biases held by places than biases held within minds. (similarity 0.83)
• IATs lack psychometric evidence of construct validity; at best 36% of variance in a single IAT may reflect implicit attitudes, and the proportion could be 0. (similarity 0.82)
• IAT scores can be changed by the ambiguous attribute response labels of an unrelated preceding mindset task, so observed change may reflect the measure rather than the attitude. (similarity 0.80)
• The IAT as conventionally implemented is open to multiple interpretations and can provide contextually malleable measurement outcomes, distinguishing the malleability of the measure from the… (similarity 0.80)
• The bias of crowds theory treats implicit bias tests as measures of situations more than persons, with most systematic variance in implicit bias being situational and context-dependent. (similarity 0.79)