Being on the lookout for validity : comment on Sriram and Greenwald (2009)

Recently, Sriram and Greenwald (2009) introduced a new IAT-like measure, the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT). Because the BIAT is a new development, empirical evidence for its validity is yet scarce. This comment focuses on two possible approaches to validation research on the BIAT: (1) a pragmatic correlational approach and (2) an experimental approach aiming at causal understanding of the BIAT task. We argue that both approaches provide valuable and mutually complementing evidence, but only experimental research can conclusively show that the to-be-measured constructs causally influence BIAT scores. Because such a causal analysis is at the core of the validity problem, research on the BIAT should reduce the asymmetry in favor of correlational validation that emerged in traditional IAT research.