Implicit Social Cognition Through the Years: The Implicit Association Test at Age 21

Implicit measures allow for the indirect investigation of psychological constructs by measuring the automatic associations between evaluative dimensions and attitude objects. Among these implicit measures, the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998) is one of the most studied and used. Despite the existence of many literature reviews on the IAT and the constructs it assesses, none of them provides information on the spread of its use in different fields of application. This literature review is aimed at filling this gap by providing an overview on the use of the IAT from the year of its first introduction until today. The main fields of application of the IAT, the specific topics for which it has been used, and its concurrent use with other implicit measures are highlighted and described. The results indicate the growing use of the IAT in ever wider and more varied range of fields.