Implicit Measures and Media Effects Research: Challenges and Opportunities

Although implicit measures are now widely used in different areas of psychology, they have received only little attention in communication science. This paper discusses the potential benefits of implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for media effects research. We first address more general theoretical and methodological issues and introduce some practical challenges that come along with implicit methods. The paper concludes by recommending that implicit measures should be added to the communication methods toolkit, but that researchers should carefully decide whether (and which) implicit measures really make sense in a particular case of research.