Reassessing the Predictive Validity of the I at II: Reanalysis of Heider & Skowronski (2007)

We recently reanalyzed data from McConnell & Leibold (2001) and Ziegert and Hanges (2005)--two prominent studies cited to support the claim that the race Implicit Association Test (IAT) predicts discriminatory behavior (e.g., Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann & Banaji, 2009; Kang, 2005; Kang & Banaji, 2006)--and found little evidence in support of the predictive validity of the race IAT (Blanton et al., 2009). In both of the reanalyzed studies, race IAT scores reduced prediction errors in regression models by only tiny amounts, and the results proved not to be robust once the impact of rater reliability, statistical specifications, or statistical outliers were taken into account. Moreover, reanalysis of McConnell and Leibold (2001) revealed a pattern of behavior consistent with the presence of a pro-Black behavioral bias, not the anti-Black bias suggested by the original authors. As a result, higher IAT scores (i.e., scores often interpreted as showing a preference for whites over blacks) predicted more egalitarian behavior toward a black confederate than a white confederate. We attempted to include a reanalysis of data from Heider and Skowronski (2007) in Blanton et al. (2009), but the data sets for Heider and Skowronski were received too late for inclusion in that earlier paper. Accordingly, this article supplements our earlier article by reporting the results of our reanalysis of the Heider and Skowronski (2007) data. REANALYSIS Heider and Skowronski (2007) reported results from two experiments: Study 1 examined whether the IAT predicted cooperative responses in a Prisoner's Dilemma Game (PDG) with white versus black partners; Study 2 examined whether the IAT predicted the friendliness of interactions with black and white confederates. Heider and Skowronski (2007) indicated that the results of both studies supported the view that the race IAT predicted adverse treatment of African-Americans. Study 1: Cooperation in a Prisoner's Dilemma Game For Study 1, Heider and Skowronski (2007) predicted that "Caucasians should cooperate more with other Caucasians than with African Americans. More important to the purpose of the present article is whether behavior toward the African American confederate can be predicted from measures of participants' attitudes toward African Americans" (p. 56, citation omitted). Their discussion of "prejudiced responding" (p. 55) and "discriminatory behavior" (p. 55) likewise indicates a focus on differential treatment of the black relative to the white playing partner. Their focus on relative cooperation rates is consistent with interpretations of the IAT among the IAT's architects, who have argued that the IAT's predictive validity hinges on the relative nature of its attitude measurement (see Nosek & Sriram, 2006). However, when discussing the predictive validity of the IAT, Heider and Skowronski moved from discussing relative treatment of black and white partners to considering only the absolute treatment of the black partner. That is, for Study 1, Heider and Skowronski reported only the correlations between the IAT and cooperation with the black PDG partner. In reanalyzing the data for Study 1, we found that the researchers also collected data on cooperation rates with the white PDG partner. Table 1 reports the correlation between the IAT and cooperation with the black and white partners, as well as the correlation between the IAT and the difference in cooperation rates between the black and white partners. Notice that, from a full examination of IAT-behavior correlates, it is clear that higher IAT scores are associated with decreased cooperation with both the black, r (140) = -.21, p