Dissociations between Direct and Indirect Measures of the Personality Self-

There would be no interest in researching indirect measures if indirect and direct assessment procedures measured identical constructs. In order to differentiate between operationalizations and constructs, in this work, the terms direct and indirect measures were used to label procedures, and the terms explicit and implicit representations were used to label the constructs. Similarly, there may be two sources for dissociations between direct and indirect measures of the personality self-concept: (a) theoretically-based dissociations between explicit and implicit representations at the construct level;

(b) method factors in direct and indirect measures at the assessment level.

Concerning the construct level, explicit representations were regarded as propositional categorizations within the Reflective System, and implicit representations as

associative clusters within the Impulsive System of the Reflective-Impulsive Model from Strack and Deutsch (in press) (see Chapter 2.2). Thus, explicit representations should be better predictors of controlled behavior, and implicit representations should be better predictors of spontaneous behavior. Recently, Asendorpf et al. (2002) carried out a double dissociation procedure between the explicit and implicit personality self-concept of shyness. A direct shyness questionnaire uniquely predicted controlled (but not spontaneous) shy behavior, whereas a shyness IAT uniquely predicted spontaneous (but not controlled) shy behavior. However, the results of the present studies, Study 1 and Study 2, showed that it is difficult to differentiate between indicators of spontaneous and controlled behavior.

Attempts to show predictive validity of indirect measures often follows an incremental validation strategy. This means that the studies usually explore whether indirect measures predict variance in relevant criteria in addition to direct measures of the same construct (for a review, cf. Fazio & Olson, 2003). In Study 2 of the present research, the anxiousness IAT added incremental validity over direct self-ratings to the prediction of the observer anxiety judgments. Conceptually, the incremental validity of the indirect measures might be attributed to two differences between explicit and implicit representations, (a) implicit representations have more direct access to the associative store than explicit representations, (b) explicit representations might be biased due to social desirability concerns (cf. Chapter 2.3).

Biases based on social desirability also affect method factors of direct and indirect measures. For instance, whereas direct self-ratings are certainly fakable (cf. Study 1), there is a controversy about IATs being fakable or not (cf. Chapter 2.4.1). Study 1 provided evidence that the shyness IAT was to some extent fakable by. However, effects were much smaller than for direct self-ratings.

Another methodical issue could refer to the question of whether the indirect procedure employs negation or not. For instance, the typical target categories of self-concept IATs are Me versus Others. For the IAP in Study 1, target categories were Me versus Notme. According to Strack and Deutsch (in press), the Impulsive System is not able to negate information. More precisely, the Impulsive System is not able to assign a true or a false value to the relation between two concepts. Instead, the Impulsive System only connects or does not connect concepts using episodic and semantic links that are available within the associative store. Therefore, it may be an interesting topic for further

research to explore whether indirect measures that employ negation (e.g., the GNATs

“Go/No-Go Association Tasks”, Nosek & Banaji, 2001; the shyness IAP of Study 1) are influenced by the Reflective System more than indirect measures that do not employ negation. However, the shyness IAP employed in Study 1 did not seem to be more controllable than the shyness IAT since the IAP was even less susceptible to faking instructions. Additionally, the IAT and the IAP contained a negation for the attribute category, that is, Shy versus Nonshy.

Another characteristic of indirect measures is that they can be influenced by the category frame of the categorization task and by individual stimulus features (cf. Fazio &

Olson, 2003). In contrast, direct self-ratings, for example, bipolar adjectives, are judged individually, that is, they are only influenced by individual stimulus features. To obtain the mean scale, the bipolar items are combined such that every item is weighed equally.

Concerning IATs, there is some evidence that individual stimulus features have an effect on the IAT score, while the category frame is more influential (cf. Chapter 2.4.2).

Finally, dissociations between direct and indirect measures may also be caused by the context dependency in indirect measures. Although indirect measures seem to be not affected by emotion inductions (Schmukle & Egloff, 2003; cf. Study 1 of the present research), they were shown to be influenced by other contextual variables (cf. Mitchell et al., 2003). Importantly enough, the present research revealed evidence that self-concept IATs are affected by the salience of a positive-negative self-dimension (see Chapter 7.2).

In summary, dissociations between direct and indirect self-concept measures might be attributed to differences at the construct and at the measurement level. At the construct level, implicit representations differ from explicit representations because of their more direct access to the associative store and a more direct effect on spontaneous behavior. At the measurement level, there are method factors that are characteristic of indirect procedures rather than of direct procedures. Indirect procedures are less fakable, presumably less apt to assess negated concepts, are influenced by the category frame and stimulus features, and are susceptible to contextual variables, particularly to the salience of a positive-negative self-dimension.