Testing the validity of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure and the Implicit Association Test: Measuring attitudes toward Dublin and country life in Ireland

The current study aimed to test the validity of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), as compared to the Implicit Association Test (IAT), by assessing the attitudes of Dublin dwellers and rural dwellers toward Dublin and country life. Discrimination between the two groups for the IAT was marginally significant. The IRAP discriminated significantly between the two groups based on an interaction effect, which showed that rural dwellers had a strong bias toward country life but Dublin dwellers did not show the same bias toward Dublin life. The IRAP data correlated moderately with the explicit measures, but the IAT did not. The findings support the IRAP as a potentially useful measure of implicit attitudes.