Book Review The Inescapable Mental Residue of Homo Categoricus

A groundbreaking article in psychology was published in 1995 by Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji. This article laid out the argument for implicit social cognition—the idea that much of our information processing of social stimuli occurs below the threshold of conscious awareness, and that because of this, indirect measures should be used to study implicit “attitudes ” among other implicit social cognitions. Soon, empirical research in the area of social cognition was forever changed by the introduction of the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) by Greenwald, McGee, and Schwartz (1998). This task pairs different target concepts with different attributes, and subjects respond faster to the concepts that are more highly associated with each other for that individual. It is, essentially, a learning task where it is easier to learn the rules of the game the more highly associated the concepts are with each other. For less associated concepts, it is more difficult to learn the rules of the game. Much was initially made of whether or not the IAT measured “attitudes. ” In social cognition, an “attitude ” is an evaluation that has affective, cognitive, and behavioral components (see Mather and Romo, 2007). Historically, attitudes had been measured with explicit self-report measures. However, the IAT, along with John Dovidio’s implicit measure of racial attitude