Where did Implicit Response Testing Come From?

Today’s implicit response tests are only possible due to a century of gradual development of understanding of the mind, and of the proliferation of cheap computer technology. There are four key ideas that laid the foundation for implicit response tests and made them possible: 1. The notion that we have attitudes that can be learned and triggered with little or no conscious awareness 2. The idea that indirect questions can reveal these non-conscious attitudes or thoughts 3. The invention of computer-based tests for measuring the implicit associations that make up our memories, and finally 4. The adaptation of these computer-based tests to measure implicit attitudes.

Each of these ideas developed in a sequence, over time.

Non-conscious Attitudes and Thoughts

Since ancient times, writers and philosophers have acknowledged that many of our thoughts and feelings arise from parts of our mind of which we are not conscious. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth Centuries, as psychology began to develop as a discipline, the subject of the subconscious mind gained much more focused attention. Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalysts in particular treated the subconscious mind as being of prime importance to our lives. Of course, the Freudian vision of the subconscious was of a seething, primal soup of repressed emotions and the source of neuroses. Psychologists today approach the subconscious differently – whereas Freud was a psychiatrist and worked with case studies of individual people, most work on what is now called the ‘non-conscious’ is conducted with experiments, across many people, generating data that can be analyzed statistically. These experiments search for patterns that reveal the common processes across the general population.