Alcohol and Drug Use
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There are many studies that use the IAT to test various factors contributing to high levels of alcohol and/or drug use. In one such study, Implicit and Explicit Alcohol-Related Cognitions in Heavy and Light Drinkers (Wiers et al.), researchers used the IAT to measure two different factors. First was arousal, measuring positive words like “energetic”, “lively” and “fun” or negative words like “sleepy”, “woozy” and “listless” with various soda and alcoholic beverage names and valence (or emotional value) using positive words like “sociable”, “good”, “pleasant” and negative words like “antisocial”, “bad” etc. These tests were performed on two co-ed groups of college students, one comprised of “light” drinkers and one of “heavy” drinkers.
The researchers were surprised by their findings. First, heavy and light drinkers did not significantly differ in their valence associations as tested by the IAT. Heavy drinkers, however, showed much stronger “implicit associations between alcohol and arousal” than their light drinking cohorts. Contrary to their expectations, researchers also found that both light and heavy drinkers showed strong negative implicit associations with alcohol. This might point to the presence of an internalized conflict amongst alcohol consumers—they’ve ingested (so to speak) both the anti-drinking campaigns of present-day America and the pro-drinking messaging of alcohol companies, contemporary entertainment etc. Also, “[while] the results on the valence IAT show that drinkers have a strong implicit negative association with alcohol… this does not necessarily reflect their associations with specific examples (e.g. beer, wine).” It could also mean that heavy drinkers know on some level that alcohol is bad for them but enjoy it so much that their arousal overwhelms their judgments on drinking.
While the arousal IAT proved a good predictor of whether or not a subject was a light or heavy drinker, the researchers raise some limitations with using the IAT in this field. Since “the IAT always combines two attribute concepts with two target concepts” there’s room for interpretational ambiguity with its findings. In other words, it could be that the difference in the IAT scores of light and heavy drinkers with regard to arousal has to do with their soda-passive associations instead of their alcohol-active associations. Second, the IAT is inherently binary. One must choose between only two choices, in this particular test that’s not an issue, as they’re testing associations between alcoholic beverages and sodas. But if a researcher wanted to test various separate kinds of alcoholic beverages versus nonalcoholic drinks, a different kind of test would need to be devised.
