Transgender Affect Misattribution Procedure (Transgender AMP): Development and Initial Evaluation of Performance of a Measure of Implicit Prejudice

Decades of social attitudes research has shown the importance of examining both implicit and explicit attitudes for a fuller understanding of attitudes. Despite evidence from the broader literature, transgender attitudes studies to date have almost exclusively utilized self-report measures to assess explicit transgender prejudice due, in large part, to the dearth of implicit transgender prejudice measures. The current study, therefore, conducted a series of three pilot studies using online samples to build a standardized procedure based on the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) to assess implicit transgender prejudice (Transgender AMP) and examined its performance to establish preliminary validity and reliability evidence for scores from the procedure. Results of the repeated-measures ANOVA showed a significant effect of prime type, demonstrating a systematic difference in the ratings of transgender primes versus neutral primes and provided initial evidence of construct validity. Although the effect size was not as large as what is reported for the original AMP, the Transgender AMP still showed sensitivity as a measure of implicit transgender prejudice. Likewise, results of the mixed ANOVA showed a significant effect of contact, replicating findings from the explicit transgender prejudice literature. Transgender AMP scores were also found to be internally consistent (α = .87). Overall, the newly developed Transgender AMP performed as expected with preliminary evidence suggesting that it is a simple, user-friendly procedure capturing implicit transgender prejudice. Public Significance Statement This study developed and evaluated the performance of a measure of implicit transgender prejudice. As most available measures of transgender prejudice are limited in their reliance on self-report methods, the new measure provides researchers with a useful tool to assess implicit, automatic forms of transgender prejudice-a construct previously largely unexamined.