Why do you think your paper is highly cited?

  Does it describe a new discovery or a new methodology that's useful to others?

A number of relatively new methods that are designed to assess various constructs implicitly receive consideration in the paper, in particular priming procedures and the “Implicit Association Test.”  The paper considers research on the mechanisms that underlie these measures, on their predictive validity, and on their interrelations.

  How did you become involved in this research?

Our lab was among the first to employ a priming procedure as an unobtrusive measure of assessing automatically activated attitudes and to demonstrate the predictive power of such attitude estimates.  The procedure is an outgrowth of a paradigm that we developed in the mid-1980s to examine the automatic activation of attitudes and our theoretical model of attitudes as object-evaluation associations.

  Could you summarize the significance of your paper in layman's terms?

The paper attempts to provide some theoretical perspective, structure, and coherence regarding various implicit measures and the multitude of findings that have emerged.  Although several unresolved theoretical and empirical issues are discussed, the measures appear to provide a useful indirect means of assessing important psychological constructs and, hence, avoiding the problems sometimes associated with direct reports.

Russell H. Fazio
Harold E. Burtt Professor
Department of Psychology
Ohio State University
Columbus , Ohio , USA