Affect Misattribution Procedure

The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), introduced by Payne, Cheng, Govorun, and Stewart in 2005, is an implicit measure of attitudes built on a simple cognitive error: people misattribute the feeling evoked by one stimulus to another. On each trial a brief affective prime (such as a Black or White face, or a positive or negative word) is flashed, followed by a neutral target -- typically an unfamiliar Chinese pictograph -- which the participant rates as more or less pleasant than average while being explicitly told to ignore the prime. Because the prime's affect bleeds into the judgment of the ambiguous target, the proportion of pleasant ratings following positive versus negative primes yields an index of the attitude toward the primes. The AMP proved remarkably reliable and resistant to control, and it predicts self-reported attitudes, voting intentions, and intergroup bias, making it one of the most widely used implicit measures alongside the Implicit Association Test.