Abstract: We review research on response-latency based (“implicit”) measures of attitudes by examining what hopes and intentions researchers have associated with their usage. We identified the hopes of (1) gaining better measures of interindividual differences in attitudes as compared to self-report measures (quality hope); (2) better predicting behavior, or predicting other behaviors, as compared to self-reports (incremental validity hope); (3) linking social-cognitive theories more adequately to empirical research (theory-link hope). We argue that the third hope should be the starting point for using these measures. Any attempt to improve these measures should include the search for a small-scale theory that adequately explains the basic effects found with such a measure. To date, small-scale theories for different measures are not equally well developed.
