Anthony Greenwald

Anthony Greenwald studied at Yale University and received his bachelor’s degree in 1959. He went on to receive his master’s from Harvard and remained there until he earned his PhD in 1963. Greenwald began his teaching career at Ohio State University as an assistant professor of psychology in 1965, where he eventually advanced to full professor in 1971. Greenwald accepted a position as Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington in 1986 and still teaches there today. He has also served on the editorial board for more than a dozen psychological journals, including Psychological Review, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition, and Consciousness and Cognition.

Greenwald has spent much of his career studying persuasion and has received many awards for his contributions to psychology. These include the National Institute of Health’s Research Scientist Award, the Donald T. Campbell Award from the Society for Personal and Social Psychology, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology’s prestigious Distinguished Scientist Award, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Psychological Science.

The Implicit Association Test, created by Greenwald, Brian Nosek, Mahzarin Banaji and others, was developed in 1995 to test a person's implicit associations. The test functions by showing a test-taker images and a list of words, classified as good or bad. One image is paired with the word good and another is paired with the word bad on either side of the screen, and the test-taker must rapidly identify the category, or side, associated with each image or word that appears on the screen. Errors in pairing can indicate an implicit association, or bias, between two concepts. The Implicit Association Test is a popular Internet tool used by several websites to test subtle biases against minority groups such as women, people of color, and immigrants.