Toward a Process-Level Understanding of Correspondence Among Indirect Measures of Racial Threat Stereotypes

Previous research often reveals relatively poor correspondence among three prominent indirect measures configured to assess racial stereotypes: the Weapon Identification Task (WIT), the First-Person Shooter Task (FPST), and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Importantly, these measures differ on a variety of procedural dimensions (e.g., task instructions, stimulus presentation, response time limits), which confounds explanations of low correspondence. In a fully within-participants design, N = 372 participants completed versions of the WIT, FPST, and IAT that were aligned on several procedural dimensions. Process modeling revealed high correlations among measures for model parameters reflecting controlled and automatic processes. However, model-based racial bias estimates correlated only moderately between the WIT and the FPST, and not at all with the IAT. Our findings suggest that all three measures share some correspondence when procedurally aligned, but each reflects a specific aspect of racial threat stereotypes.