Stalking the perfect measure of implicit self-esteem: The blind men and the elephant revisited?

TLDR

Recent interest in implicit self‑esteem has led to new assessment tools whose psychometric properties remain underexplored. The study aimed to assess the reliability and validity of seven implicit self‑esteem measures. The authors evaluated these measures by testing their psychometric properties. The seven measures showed little intercorrelation, weak links to explicit self‑esteem, only a few had acceptable test‑retest reliability, limited predictive power, and some sensitivity to context, underscoring challenges for future implicit self‑esteem research.

Abstract

Recent interest in the implicit self-esteem construct has led to the creation and use of several new assessment tools whose psychometric properties have not been fully explored. In this article, the authors investigated the reliability and validity of seven implicit self-esteem measures. The different implicit measures did not correlate with each other, and they correlated only weakly with measures of explicit self-esteem. Only some of the implicit measures demonstrated good test-retest reliabilities, and overall, the implicit measures were limited in their ability to predict our criterion variables. Finally, there was some evidence that implicit self-esteem measures are sensitive to context. The implications of these findings for the future of implicit self-esteem research are discussed.