In their review of validity of the Implicit Association Test and affective priming, J. De Houwer, S. Teige-Mocigemba, A. Spruyt, and A. Moors identified validity with establishment of "basic theoretical understanding" of the measures. It is agreed that theoretical understanding has an important role in making measures more valid and useful.…

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) requires responding to category contrasts such as young versus old, male versus female, and pleasant versus unpleasant. In introducing the IAT, A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, and J. L. K. Schwartz (1998) proposed that IAT measures reflect mental structures involving the nominal features of the IAT's categories…

Numeric values of psychological measures often have an arbitrary character before research has grounded their meanings, thereby providing what S. J. Messick (1995) called consequential validity (part of which H. Blanton and J. Jaccard now identify as metric meaningfulness). Some measures are predisposed by their design to acquire meanings easily,…