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Jon D. Hanson & Mark Yeboah, The Policy IAT, in Ideology, Psychology, and Law 265 (Jon D. Hanson ed., 2012).


Abstract: Since its initial publication, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has been applied in a diverse array of disciplines. Application to the legal and policy arenas, however, has been uncommon. This is true even though the dominant schemas that shape law and policy are like the attitudes, stereotypes, and other forms of implicit cognition that the IAT is so often harnessed to measure. Based upon research designed to identify the dominant knowledge structures, schemas and categories that shape law and policy, the most significant and salient policy scripts boil down to "markets are good, regulation is bad." This chapter will discuss the initial results of an ongoing Policy IAT intended to investigate the strength of those policy scripts across the ideological spectrum. The results shed light on the variability of policy scripts across political categories and attributional styles along a situationist-dispositionist spectrum as well as the malleability of implicit associations.