Outside of the variety of ways of explicitly asking people how they feel about another group — feeling thermometers, like/dislike scales, favorability ratings — explicit measures asked using mechanisms designed to overcome or attenuate social desirability concerns — bogus pipeline, ACASI — and a plethora of implicit measures — affect misattribution, IAT — there exist a few other interesting ways of measuring affect:
- Games as measures – Jeremy Weinstein uses games like the dictator game to measure (inter-ethnic) affect. One can use prisoner’s dilemma, among other games, to do the same.
- Systematic bias in responding to factual questions when ignorant about the correct answer. For example, most presidential elections years since 1988, ANES has posed a variety of retrospective evaluative and factual questions including assessments of the state of the economy, whether the inflation/unemployment/crime rose, remained the same, or declined in the past year (or some other time frame). Analyses of these questions have revealed significant ‘partisan bias’, but these questions have yet to be used as a measure of ‘partisan affect’ that is the likely cause of the observed ‘bias’.