Tracking the Use of Project Implicit Data

By Jordan Axt

Since its founding in 1998, more than 20 million people have completed studies at the Project Implicit websites. Starting in 2014, Project Implicit has made the data from the demonstration site freely available for researchers, journalists, educators, and others who want to use it. These data are posted on the Open Science Framework and are updated annually. There are currently data from 14 topics collected since 2003. Some of data from the Project Implicit international sites are also available.

Recently, a group of Project Implicit researchers compiled a list of peer-reviewed publications using these publicly available data. These 24 papers use data from 11 of the available topics. You can look over the list at this link: List of papers using public Project Implicit data.

These papers cover a wide range of topics such as: Changes over time in race and sexuality attitudes, how participants respond to learning about implicit bias, and specific biases among specific groups of participants, such as health care providers. Several researchers have also combined attitude data with geographical data to investigate how attitudes cluster in specific areas of the United States and whether those attitudes predict real-world disparities in policing and health care.

The data from Project Implicit allow for interesting explorations of many different types of questions. This list of papers will be updated regularly, so you can check back in the future to see additional uses of Project Implicit data.