Page "Attitude (psychology)" Paragraph 18

Implicit measures are not consciously directed and are assumed to be automatic, which may make implicit measures more valid and reliable than explicit measures ( such as self-reports ).

For example, people can be motivated such that they find it socially desirable to appear to have certain attitudes.

An example of this is that people can hold implicit prejudicial attitudes, but express explicit attitudes that report little prejudice.

Implicit measures help account for these situations and look at attitudes that a person may not be aware of or want to show.

Implicit measures therefore usually rely on an indirect measure of attitude.

For example, the Implicit Association Test ( IAT ) examines the strength between the target concept and an attribute element by considering the latency in which a person can examine two response keys when each has two meanings.

With little time to carefully examine what the participant is doing they respond according to internal keys.

This priming can show attitudes the person has about a particular object.