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Symposium: Implicit Attitudes in Political Science Research
It is easy enough to rattle off numerous categories of social identities long of interest to political behavior scholars--race, sex, state or nation, party, ideology, social class, etc. But, a precise definition and measurement strategy for examining these identities is more elusive. This article discusses the conceptual foundations of a recently developed approach to measuring identity and focuses on its specific application as a new measure of partisanship in the United States.
Balanced identity theory (BIT) (Cvencek, Greenwald, and Meltzoff 2012; Greenwald et al. 2002) offers appealing conceptual parsimony and a clear link to a specific measurement paradigm. Identity is presented in BIT simply as an association (that can vary in strength) between the self and some category. The implicit association test (IAT) has proven effective in using response latency to measure relative identity. This is accomplished when self becomes the attribute concept and the identity in question becomes the target concept (e.g., Devos and Banaji 2005; Greenwald and Farnham 2000; Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald 2002), producing a response latency measure of the extent to which that social category is connected to the individual's self-concept in his or her mind. Thus, the association measured is precisely the one that defines an identity in the BIT framework. This approach to measuring implicit identity has seen increased application in social psychology and in the future will prove useful to political scientists studying a wide range of identities. I describe an example of its use in evaluating the extent to which an individual's conceptualization of self is cognitively linked to a political party group.
IDENTITY
Our understanding of identity descends largely from social identity theory (SIT) (Tajfel 1969, 1974, 1982a, 1982b; Tajfel et al. 1971; Tajfel and Turner 2004; Turner 1975), and self-categorization theory (SCT) (Turner et al. 1987, 1999; Turner 1982, 1999; Turner et al. 1994).1Identity, according to Tajfel (1974, 69) is "that part of an individual's self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the emotional significance attached to that membership." Building upon SIT, SCT focuses more directly on the complex interaction between the self and group identities. As Turner and Onorato...