Might a result indicating preference for one group over another be due to differences in familiarity with the groups?
The possibility that familiarity with one category (e.g, flowers) compared to the other (e.g. insects) can influence performance has been tested in research. It appears that the particular familiarity of individual items in the categories do not have much influence on IAT effects. Also, faces used in the web-versions of the race and age attitude IAT should be equally unfamiliar because they are all computer-constructed morphs – none is the face of a real person. For more in depth information see Ottaway et al., 2000, Dasgupta et al., 1999, and Rudman et al., 1999. At the same time, there is an important relationship between familiarity and liking that reaches back to classic research in psychology. So, there may be a role for familiarity in liking of the categories – people tend to like things that they are familiar with compared to things that they are not. What might emerge as an implicit prejudice may have its basis in unfamiliarity. Certainly that’s what we think might account for
