What is Project Implicit?
Project Implicit is a Virtual Laboratory for the social and behavioral sciences designed to facilitate the research of implicit social cognition: cognitions, feelings, and evaluations that are not necessarily available to conscious awareness, conscious control, conscious intention, or self-reflection. Project Implicit comprises a network of laboratories, technicians, and research scientists at Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia. The project was initially launched as a demonstration website in 1998 at Yale University, and began to function fully as a research enterprise following a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 2003.
There are five broad objectives for Project Implicit:
- Develop methodological and technological innovations to advance psychological
research on the Internet.
The most significant challenge for conducting efficacious research on the Internet is in the creation of an effective laboratory setting that (a) ethically administers research protocols including consent and debriefing, (b) provides ample security for the privacy of participants and their data, (c) institutes adequate design tools of the study setting to maximize the impact of the independent variables, (d) minimizes the presence of external elements that disrupt the experimental procedures and introduce error into research designs, and (e) explores tools beyond the standard survey. - Develop an interface for researchers without significant technical expertise,
to use Project Implicit virtual laboratory research (VLR) tools.
The slow growth in the number of psychologists using the Internet for research purposes may be explained, in part, by uncertainty about its methodological strengths and limitations. Additionally, there are serious and intimidating technical challenges that precede the development of an effective VLR design. While surveys are relatively easy to create and administer via the web, more sophisticated experimental protocols require a new generation of tools and resources than those available to most psychologists. A major component of Project Implicit is to develop an effective virtual experimental environment and implement tools that will enable psychologists to pursue experimental research on the Internet. - Provide an impetus for theoretical and methodological innovation for research on implicit
social cognition.
The methodological tools and procedures proposed in Objectives 1 and 2 are expected to have significant impact on future directions. With only the framework of a virtual laboratory complete, data from existing demonstration and research websites have already formed the basis of multiple papers, contributed data to others, been presented at numerous conferences and colloquia, and provided critical supplements to research from the traditional laboratory. Research via the Internet can expand the size and potency of the researcher's toolkit including increased access to very large samples, flexibility of research design, the ease of data collection, and provides a global reach. These qualities provide a source of data that enables broad confirmation and extension of findings from other sources, and enables investigations that are simply not possible in the traditional laboratory. An important advantage of Internet-based research is the increased opportunity to examine subject populations that are more diverse and harder to reach than students in Introductory Psychology. Data collections on the Internet that allow drop-in visitors will not produce samples that are representative of any definable group (e.g., the U.S. population). It will, however, provide samples of much greater diversity in age, education, country and state of residence, and even ethnicity than do the samples that typically form the basis of psychological research and interpretation. In addition, the Internet can provide access to samples that would not otherwise be recruitable to the traditional laboratory because of (a) small numbers (e.g., Cantonese/Spanish/English tri-linguals), (b) proximity to the laboratory (e.g., students during summer recess), or (c) brief windows of opportunity for data collection (e.g., attitudes of patriotism on the 4th of July, attitudes of patriotism on this 4th of July). - Integrate education and research missions at Project Implicit demonstration and research websites.
The original impetus for our foray into Internet research was education and dissemination of a tool to learn about implicit attitudes and knowledge. The overwhelming response to the website, and its continued use in education (in both secondary and post-secondary school settings), business, diversity training, law enforcement, and casual settings suggests that there is value and interest in it across a variety of educational settings. Through the websites, we promote the value of psychological research by providing an opportunity to participate in and contribute to on-going research while simultaneously learning about the fruits of related research efforts. Although numbers are not the only criterion, it appears that the website offers an experience that is interesting enough that hundreds of thousands of individuals have visited it and remained sufficiently engaged to complete full tasks. - Analyze and archive the massive databases from the demonstration websites.
Since the first demonstration website opened in September of 1998, over 3.5 million tasks have been completed providing the largest database on implicit attitudes and knowledge currently available. The topics include preferences for ethnic and racial groups, religious groups, sexual orientation, gender, stereotypes of race and crime, gender and science, and ethnic-national links. These data have produced unique findings and have served as the basis of multiple papers. However, we have only scratched the surface of the potential value of these data in confirming laboratory effects, allowing extensions of findings to specific samples, and imagining novel investigations that are possible because of the unique features of these datasets (e.g., very large sample sizes, large numbers of members of minority groups).