Book Review: Wittenbrink, B., & Schwarz, N. (Eds.). (2007). Implicit Measures of Attitudes. New York: Guilford

A great deal of cognitive, affective, and behavioral regulation occurs outside people’s awareness and control. For example, encountering a member of a social group automatically activates traits associated with that group and elicits trait-consistent behaviors in observers (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). Similarly, evaluations of objects within one’s environment, like a person or event, may also occur automatically and without deliberation. Such evaluations, labeled implicit attitudes, result from processes that consume few mental resources and are unintentional, unconscious, and uncontrolled. Although a large body of research concerning implicit processes exists in the social-cognitive psychology literature, organizational scholars are beginning to recognize their importance as well (Haines & Sumner, 2006). For example, implicit measures have been recommended for assessing personality (Bing, LeBreton, Davison, Migetz, & James, 2007), racial bias (Ziegert & Hanges, 2005), leadership perceptions (Lord, Brown, Harvey, & Hall, 2001), trait affectivity (Rosen, Akirmak, & Johnson, 2008), and organizational identification (Lane & Scott, 2007), among other phenomena. These recommendations are reasonable given that many characteristics of a typical workplace (e.g., high cognitive load and routinization) are ones that amplify the impact of implicit processes and attitudes. Given the need for more research on implicit processes, Wittenbrink and Schwarz’s Implicit Measures of Attitudes is a useful resource for organizational scholars interested in measuring implicit attitudes and associative knowledge. This edited volume has 11 chapters with contributions from 23 academics. The introductory chapter provides an overview of explicit and implicit measures and discusses potential benefits of the latter (e.g., a means for assessing attitudes that respondents are unable or unwilling to report). Although it is a good primer, anyone who is familiar with implicit processes and the techniques used to measure them will not be surprised by the material presented in this chapter. The remainder of the book is divided into two sections. The first section introduces readers to various types of implicit measures and how they are administered and interpreted. Several techniques entail the collection of reaction time data. For example, Lane, Banaji, Nosek, and Greenwald (chap. 3) describe the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a commonly used reaction time measure, and summarize evidence for its reliability and validity. The authors also provide a how-to guide so that readers can construct their own IAT. Wittenbrink (chap. 2) discusses implicit measures that use priming techniques. For example, evaluative priming involves participants identifying the affective valence (e.g., pleasant vs. repulsive) of target words or pictures following exposure to an attitude object prime. Primes that facilitate faster responding to pleasant (vs. repulsive) targets indicates that respondents are favorably (vs. unfavorably) disposed to the attitude object. This method could easily be applied to work-based attitudes. For example, employees could be primed to think about their supervisor before judging the valence of target words. Faster reaction times when responding to positively valenced words would indicate a more favorable attitude toward one’s supervisor. Book Review