Online Administration of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure: The Web-IRAP

It can be argued that the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most popular assessment of implicit bias available. The IAT in part owes its popularity to the IAT website, launched shortly after development of the test itself, which has accumulated millions of responses from self-enrolled participants. The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) is an experimental preparation grounded in relational frame theory (RFT) devised to capture specific relations among stimuli. It provides a more granular analysis of bias, a distinct advantage over the IAT, and its internal reliability is among the best of all implicit measures and certainly comparable to the IAT. The present study attempted to develop and validate an IRAP website equivalent to the IAT website by replicating a foundational IRAP study. This study tasked participants with categorizing positively and negatively valenced words as either "pleasant " or "unpleasant. " A total of 31 out of 40 participants survived performance-related criteria at similar rates to previous IRAP studies, demonstrating the feasibility of web-delivered IRAP studies. The results successfully replicated the main effect, an overall preference toward positive words, as well as a pattern of specific trial-type scores commonly observed in IRAP studies. These results were internally consistent. The successful development of the web-IRAP offers the potential to leverage advantages typical of web-delivered research, including increased power, greater ecological validity, and inclusion of underrepresented demographic groups.