Indirectness of a measure depends on researcher’s inference, not subject’s awareness

Evidence

Experiments that demonstrate implicit attitudes rely on indirect measures to detect their operation. The distinction between direct and indirect measures depends only on the relation between what the subject is informed about the purpose of a measure and what the researcher chooses to infer from the subject’s response. If the subject is advised that A is being measured, but the researcher uses the response to infer something about B, the direct measure of A is an indirect measure of B. In the case of nonreactive indirect measures, the subject is unaware that anything is being measured and, accordingly, there is no direct-measure interpretation of the subject’s response. Only a small portion of the research considered in this article involves the use of nonreactive indirect measures. — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition, 83

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘indirect measure’ is defined formally by the researcher’s inference relation, and that nonreactive (unawareness) measures are a rarer subset — a distinction that matters for interpreting implicit-bias findings.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reading purpose: whether implicit bias measures can validly index the MOC’s group defenses hinges on the direct/indirect and reactive/nonreactive distinctions made here. — connects to: An indirect measure is defined relationally by researcher inference, not by procedure. — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 82; The implicit self-esteem hypothesis requires an indirect measure that did not yet exist. — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 173

Broader Connections

• An indirect measure is defined relationally by researcher inference, not by procedure. #corroborates (0.93) — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition, 82