It all began with…
…a simple, radical idea: that much of the mind operates outside of awareness — and that milliseconds could measure it. Here's how that idea grew into a field, and how this lab descends from the people who grew it.
Three papers that built a field
Every reaction-time study on this site runs on intellectual machinery built in a remarkably short window — roughly six years, three papers, two people and their students. So… a brief history lesson!
The field gets its name
Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji publish “Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes” in Psychological Review — the manifesto arguing that attitudes and stereotypes operate automatically, outside awareness and outside the reach of questionnaires. The paper names the field this entire website lives in.
Greenwald & Banaji (1995)
Milliseconds catch a stereotype in the act
Banaji and her former doctoral student Curtis Hardin publish “Automatic stereotyping” in Psychological Science: gender stereotypes measurably speed and slow judgments of pronouns, in fractions of a second, whether participants intend it or not. Reaction time as a ruler for the unintended — the method this site demonstrates twelve different ways. (Hold onto the name Hardin…it returns below!)
Banaji & Hardin (1996)
The IAT arrives
Greenwald and colleagues publish the Implicit Association Test — the two-key sorting task that became the most famous instrument in social psychology. Greenwald and Banaji's joint research program carries it to the public through Project Implicit, where millions of visitors have since taken one. If you've ever heard the phrase “implicit bias,” you've felt this paper's wake.
Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz (1998)
The GNAT — a family recipe
Brian Nosek and Banaji introduce the Go/No-Go Association Task: one category at a time, a spacebar, and a deadline — signal detection instead of two-key sorting. Four of the twelve studies on this site are GNATs. Given the lineage you're about to read, I like to say the GNAT is a family recipe.
Nosek & Banaji (2001)
The toolbox fills out
The field blooms: the Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne and colleagues, 2005), the Single-Category IAT (Karpinski & Steinman, 2006), the manikin approach–avoidance task (Krieglmeyer & Deutsch, 2010), and mouse-trajectory tracking (Freeman & Ambady, 2010). Every one of them is running, right now, on the Reaction Time Studies page — and you can play them all.
Four generations, one question
Academia keeps genealogies the way families do — advisor to student, lab to lab. Mine runs straight through the founders above. Mahzarin Banaji was my advisor's advisor, which makes her…my academic grandmother! And the question has stayed in the family the whole way down: what is the mind doing that its owner can't report?
Anthony G. Greenwald
Co-founder of implicit social cognition; creator of the IAT. Trained Mahzarin Banaji at Ohio State.
Mahzarin R. Banaji
Co-founder of implicit social cognition; co-creator of the GNAT and Project Implicit. Trained Curtis Hardin at Yale.
Curtis D. Hardin
Co-author of “Automatic stereotyping” (1996) and co-architect of shared reality theory. Trained me at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Michael W. Magee
PhD, CUNY Graduate Center (2010). Now measuring self-compassion, vegan stigma, masculinity, and the moral status of animals — implicitly, of course.
And the lineage is on paper, not just in spirit: my first publication was written with my advisor — a shared-reality account of when religious belief buffers unconscious threat — and it appeared, fittingly, in the journal Social Cognition. Well…there's a reason this is called the Social Cognition Lab! Read Magee & Hardin (2010) or see it among my publications.
History is better when you can play it.
The IAT, the GNAT, and their ten descendants are all running on this site — each one calculates your score and shows it to you.
Try the Reaction Time Studies!Key references
Banaji, M. R., & Hardin, C. D. (1996). Automatic stereotyping. Psychological Science, 7(3), 136–141. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00346.x
Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological Review, 102(1), 4–27. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.102.1.4
Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464–1480. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1464
Hardin, C. D., & Higgins, E. T. (1996). Shared reality: How social verification makes the subjective objective. In R. M. Sorrentino & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: The interpersonal context (Vol. 3, pp. 28–84). Guilford Press.
Magee, M. W., & Hardin, C. D. (2010). In defense of religion: Shared reality moderates the unconscious threat of evolution. Social Cognition, 28(3), 379–400. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2010.28.3.379
Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2001). The go/no-go association task. Social Cognition, 19(6), 625–666. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.19.6.625.20886