Implicit Association Test for Aggressiveness: Further evidence of validity and resistance to desirable responding

This paper reports the results of three interrelated studies investigating the validity and resistance to desirable responding of the Implicit Association Test for Aggressiveness (IAT-A). In Studies 1 and 2, we tested its validity by correlating it with an established explicit measure of aggressiveness, the conceptually closest measure of socially desirable responding (SDR), and various aggression-related criteria in two large samples of participants. The results supported the validity of IAT-A. It had satisfactory reliability, it was non-significantly or weakly related to an explicit measure of aggressiveness and unrelated to the SDR measure, and it explained different aggression-related behaviors over and above the explicit aggressiveness measure. In Study 3, we examined the IAT-A's susceptibility to deliberate response distortion by comparing the IAT-A and self-reported aggressiveness between situations of honest responding and simulated personnel selection. The results revealed that the IAT-A is less susceptible to deliberate response distortion than the self-report measure of explicit aggressiveness. The mean result on the IAT-A was almost identical between the two response situations, whereas for the self-report measure of aggressiveness, participants scored significantly lower in the simulated selection situation. Altogether, the results suggest that IAT-A is a valid and potentially useful implicit aggressiveness measure. •Research on the IAT-Aggressiveness (IAT-A) revealed inconsistent findings.•IAT-A is non-significantly to weakly related to self-reported aggressiveness.•IAT-A predicts aggression related behavior better than self-reported aggressiveness.•IAT-A is less susceptible to SDR than self-reported aggressiveness.•IAT paradigm seems to be useful for implicit aggressiveness measurement.