Using reaction time procedures to assess implicit attitudes toward violence in a nonconvicted male sample

Abstract

In this study, we sought to capture implicit attitudes toward violence by administering response latency measures. We then examined their associations with explicit (e.g., assessed with self-report) attitudes toward violence and self-reported violent behavior in a combined sample of males from a Canadian university and males from the general community (N = 251; 156 students and 95 community members). To date, there have been mixed findings regarding these associations; some of this inconsistency may be due to the difficulty in accurately conceptualizing and assessing implicit attitudes toward violence. Therefore, we administered three response latency measures to assess this construct: a violence evaluation implicit association test (VE-IAT), a personalized VE-IAT (P-VE-IAT), and a violence evaluation relational responding task, along with three self-report measures of explicit attitudes toward violence and three self-report measures of violent behavior. More positive implicit attitudes toward violence were related to more positive explicit attitudes toward violence (for VE-IAT and P-VE-IAT; r = 0.18 to 0.22), greater likelihood of violence (for VE-IAT; r = 0.18 and for P-VE-IAT; r = 0.16), and greater propensity for violence (for the VE-IAT; r = 0.16). All measures of explicit attitudes toward violence and violent behavior were moderately to strongly associated with one another (r = 0.42 to 0.81). Furthermore, implicit attitudes toward violence explained additional variance in some violent outcomes above explicit attitudes alone. Our findings suggest that scores on certain reaction time measures are important for understanding likelihood and propensity for violence, especially when combined with explicit attitude measures.