Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Measuring automatic associations and unconscious bias.
A practical behavioural-science component for EU projects
Behavioural science plays a growing role in many EU-funded projects — whether in understanding social attitudes, evaluating interventions, or designing training and awareness activities. One of the most widely used tools in this space is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT measures how quickly people associate concepts (e.g., “woman–career”, “technology–trust”, “migrant–threat”, “AI–benefit”) and reveals patterns that are often not captured through traditional surveys or interviews. In other words: “The IAT helps projects understand not just what people say they think — but the automatic associations that guide perceptions and behaviour. Headway adapts this method into a fully functional, project-specific tool that can be deployed in pilots, evaluations, training activities, and research tasks across different Work Packages.” Below is what sets our approach apart.
The IAT helps projects understand not just what people say they think — but the automatic associations that guide perceptions and behaviour.
Headway adapts this method into a fully functional, project-specific tool that can be deployed in pilots, evaluations, training activities, and research tasks across different Work Packages. Below is what sets our approach apart.
We turn the IAT method into a working digital tool aligned to your project’s needs
Rather than offering a generic or “template” IAT, we build a tailored version that matches the thematic priorities of your project — whether gender equality, inclusion, digital literacy, migration, participation, health attitudes, or trust in institutions. What we deliver:
- A validated IAT adapted to the project’s domains
- A coded, tested, GDPR-compliant digital module
- Usability improvements and instructions suitable for all audiences
- Integration into pilots, user studies, training programmes, or evaluation frameworks
This allows consortia to apply a robust behavioural-science method without needing to design or code it themselves.
We provide advanced comparison and visualisation options for meaningful interpretation.
Individual IAT results are one thing. What truly adds value in EU projects is the ability to compare results across groups, pilots, or countries. Our platform includes:
- Distributions of implicit associations across demographics
- Comparisons between intervention and control groups
- Pre/post measurement for training or awareness activities
- Cohort-level dashboards and simplified visual summaries
These visualisations can be directly used in:
- Impact evaluation reports
- Pilot analysis deliverables
- Scientific publications
- Policy recommendations
- Dissemination materials
This helps partners move beyond “we ran an IAT” to “this is what it revealed about our stakeholders.”
We combine implicit data with explicit survey responses for deeper behavioural insight.
Understanding implicit attitudes becomes much more powerful when paired with:
- structured questionnaires,
- self-reported attitudes,
- demographic information, or
- contextual variables.
We help consortia:
- design meaningful explicit questions,
- integrate them cleanly with implicit data,
- analyse discrepancies between explicit and implicit attitudes, and
- interpret what these patterns mean for policy, training, or intervention design.
This creates a multilayered behavioural dataset that is far richer than either method alone.
We support the selection of stimuli (words/images) using linguistic models such as BERT.
The effectiveness of an IAT depends heavily on the specific words used. This is especially important in multilingual and multicultural EU contexts. Headway uses:
- BERT-based semantic similarity modelling,
- frequency and salience weighting,
- conceptual clustering,
- linguistic sensitivity checks,
to help partners choose the vocabulary that best represents the associations they want to study. This ensures that:
- the test measures the right concepts,
- translations are not introducing bias,
- stimuli feel natural in each partner country, and
- results remain meaningful and comparable.