The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one of the most popular measures in psychological research. A lack of standardization across IATs has resulted in significant variability among stimuli used by researchers, including the positive and negative words used in evaluative IATs. Does the variability in attribute words in evaluative IATs produce unwanted variability in measurement quality across studies? The present work investigated the effect of evaluative stimuli across three studies using 13 IATs and over 60,000 participants. The 64 positive and negative words that we tested provided similar measurement quality. Further, measurement was satisfactory even in IATs that used only category labels as stimuli. These results suggest that common sense is probably a sufficient method for selection of evaluative stimuli in the IAT. For reasonable measurement quality, we recommend that researchers using evaluative IATs in English select words randomly from the set we tested in the present research.

内隐联想测试 (IAT) 是心理学研究中最流行的测量方法之一。IAT 之间缺乏标准化导致研究人员使用的刺激之间存在显着差异，包括评价性 IAT 中使用的正面和负面词语。评估 IAT 中属性词的可变性是否会在研究中产生不需要的测量质量可变性？目前的工作使用 13 个 IAT 和超过 60,000 名参与者调查了三项研究中评价性刺激的影响。我们测试的 64 个正面和负面词提供了相似的测量质量。此外，即使在仅使用类别标签作为刺激的 IAT 中，测量结果也令人满意。这些结果表明常识可能是在 IAT 中选择评价性刺激的充分方法。