An Unconscious Drive to Help Others? Using the Implicit Association Test to Measure Prosocial Motivation

We introduce an Implicit Association Test whose purpose is to measure implicit-or unconscious-prosocial motivation. In doing so, our aim is to provide researchers with a tool that can serve as a complement to explicit, survey-based measures of prosocial and public service motivation. We present the results of a series of tests designed to probe the validity of our version of the Implicit Association Test, which we call the "Pro-IAT." First, we test the Pro-IAT's known groups' validity by administering it to four groups of subjects that theory and empirical evidence suggest differ in their prosocial and public service motivation-MPA students, MBA students, Mturk adults, and local government employees. Second, we examine correlations between subjects' scores on the Pro-IAT and subjects' survey-based prosocial and public service motivation. Third, we use an online task to test whether subjects' scores on the Pro-IAT are associated with the amount of (real) money they pledge to charity. Fourth, we use a survey experiment to test whether the Pro-IAT is resistant to a randomly assigned social desirability prime. Our tests provide strong support for the Pro-IAT's known groups' validity and modest support for the Pro-IAT's predictive validity. Additionally, they suggest that the Pro-IAT is resistant to social desirability bias and is measuring a different dimension of prosocial/public service motivation than survey-based measures.