Ten Frequently Asked Questions About Implicit Measures and Their Frequently Supposed, But Not Entirely Correct Answers

Self-report measures are often criticised for their susceptibility to self-presentation and their inability to capture mental contents that are inaccessible to introspection. Over the past decade, researchers have attempted to overcome these problems by means of implicit measures, which infer mental contents from participants' performance on experimental paradigms. In the present article I provide an overview of the currently available implicit measures and discuss 10 common assumptions about these measures. I argue that many of these assumptions are either inconsistent with the available evidence or theoretically problematic for conceptual reasons. Nevertheless, implicit measures have proven their usefulness in predicting behaviours that are difficult to predict with traditional self-report measures. Thus, even though implicit measures may not be able to provide the information that is sometimes attributed to these measures, they represent a valuable addition to the toolbox of psychological instruments in understanding the determinants of human behaviour.