An Unconscious Drive to Help Others? Using the Implicit Association Test to Measure Prosocial Motivation

Abstract

:We introduce an Implicit Association Test whose purpose is to measure implicit—or unconscious—prosocial motivation. In doing so, our aim is to provide researchers with a tool that can serve as a complement to explicit, survey-based measures of prosocial and public service motivation. We present the results of a series of tests designed to probe the validity of our version of the Implicit Association Test, which we call the “Pro-IAT.” First, we test the Pro-IAT’s known groups’ validity by administering it to four groups of subjects that theory and empirical evidence suggest differ in their prosocial and public service motivation—MPA students, MBA students, Mturk adults, and local government employees. Second, we examine correlations between subjects’ scores on the Pro-IAT and subjects’ survey-based prosocial and public service motivation. Third, we use an online task to test whether subjects’ scores on the Pro-IAT are associated with the amount of (real) money they pledge to charity. Fourth, we use a survey experiment to test whether the Pro-IAT is resistant to a randomly assigned social desirability prime. Our tests provide strong support for the Pro-IAT’s known groups’ validity and modest support for the Pro-IAT’s predictive validity. Additionally, they suggest that the Pro-IAT is resistant to social desirability bias and is measuring a different dimension of prosocial/public service motivation than survey-based measures.

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