What is Psynapse?

Psynapse designs and delivers tests of non-conscious attitudes, personality, and behavioural tendencies across recruitment psychometrics, executive training and development, organisational culture, and marketing.

Psychologists have long known that people often don't say what they're really thinking. They may not know what underlying beliefs and automatic tendencies their snap judgements are based on, or they may not feel comfortable telling you their true thoughts or opinions.

Psynapse's designs and delivers implicit tests that identify and measure the deep associative beliefs underlie both of these obstacles to explore the non-conscious and instinctive drivers of people's thoughts, preferences, and behaviours.

Psynapse Is Different

Implicit testing measures instinctive, deep associative beliefs, while removing the effects of subjectivity, bias, self-censoring, and deliberate deception.

Conventional task or questionnaire-based measures of personality and attitudes are often not good predictors of role fit and performance. In fact, the measurement tools most expert recruiters believe are the most powerful predictors of performance don't actually match very well with actual performance after a hiring decision.

Developed and used in experimental and social psychology for over 15 years, implicit tests have shown impressive power in predicting consumer behaviour, social and political attitudes, brand preferences, personality, and behavioural style.

How It Works

Psynapse tests measure the strength of people’s associations between personal and social concepts, behavioural tendencies, and values. The tests can be targeted to assess virtually any psychological or attitudinal dimension your organisation wants to have the inside line on.

Because tests are analysed for speed and accuracy, they prevent conscious or deliberative thought processes. This means responses simply cannot be faked or suppressed.

The speed and accuracy with which complimentary and contrasting concepts can be distinguished represents the strength of a person's deep associations with the targeted concept or dimension.

Why Is Psynapse So Powerful?

People's deep associative beliefs are extremely robust and pervasive drivers of their behaviour, particularly routine and automatic behaviours. They provide the all-important "why" of so much of people's behaviour, often when people themselves cannot explain their beliefs or behaviour.

The self-awareness and feedback experience that follows from our implicit testing is unique and instant. Because of this, it and can be a powerful catalyst for personal development and change by demonstrating beliefs and tendencies that people may be unaware they have, or unwilling to confront about themselves.

Describing what a person is like in general, as conventional personality tests do, often doesn't give much insight in to what they are like in specific situations, or how they go about performing specific tasks. What people say or believe about themselves can be inconsistent, and sometimes not very accurate.

Most measures of personality rely on people's self-awareness, and willingness to be honest about who and how they think they are. But research tells us people often aren't very objective about themselves, and they may have plenty of reasons for portraying themselves in a particular way.

Psynapse Applications

Training and Development

Implicit tests are a powerful catalyst for personal change and self-development, providing people with a deeper understanding of their own preferences and behavioural tendencies, many of which they may be unaware of. Bringing these associations to conscious awareness is a key step in planning personal development and promoting new strategy use.

Organisation Culture and Change

Psynapse tests can identify underlying obstacles to organisational development, such as gender and cultural diversity, safety practices, and adoption of strategic and operational change. Psynapse designs customised implicit tests for an almost limitless range of organisational dynamics, attitudes, preferences, and beliefs.

Social Research, Marketing and Advertising

People often don't know why they buy particular products or are loyal to particular brands, or change their social behaviours and habits. Or sometimes, they are just reluctant to admit the reasons. Implicit tests can identify the non-conscious drivers of consumer's brand and product attitudes by identifying the instinctive attitudes, feelings, and beliefs that inform much of consumer and social behaviour.

Individual Self-awareness and Development

Many employers want know about your unconscious beliefs and behaviours. You can identify your personal and professional strengths, or you may simply be curious to learn more about your own unconscious attitudes and behavioural tendencies. If you take a test, you will receive an interpreted report and its implications across a range of important job competencies and skills sets.

Research and Academic Testing

Psynapse is committed to fostering academic work in the area of implicit cognition. We design implicit tests of virtually any individual difference factor or social attitude. This capability is offered at minimal cost to academic and not-for-profit researchers. In return we ask that you help us by contributing to Psynapse's database validation of personality and attitudinal factors.

Recruitment and Selection Screening

In addition to implicit tests of the most frequently used Big Five personality factors, Psynapse offers implicit tests assessing leadership and communication style, co-operation and competition, risk aversion and risk taking, integrity, emotional intelligence, self-esteem, and self-regulation. Results can be compared within cohorts, against previous successful hires, or Psynapse's normative database.

What People Are Saying

This is what industry partners, cognitive scientists, and behavioural experts are saying.

What Are Implicit Attitudes?

In psychological research, we know that people's beliefs and attitudes operate at two different levels.

At the first level are people's conscious, explicit beliefs and attitudes - what we know and choose to believe about ourselves, about others, about the way the world works.

At the second level are people's non-conscious, or implicit, thoughts and attitudes about themselves, about others, about the world, sometimes referred to as deep associative learning.

These are formed by deep, non-conscious associative connections between concepts that are frequently, and very rapidly, activated together. This so-called rapid cognition is often unintentional, and it occurs outside conscious control.

In every day terms, implicit attitudes are our pervasive, deep-seated "gut feelings", snap judgements, first impressions, instincts, and unconscious habits or behavioural tendencies.

They are very robust drivers of behaviour, and they are often resistant to change because they often exist outside our conscious awareness.

These beliefs and attitudes are based on logic and information, and they determine our purposeful, deliberate, considered behaviour.

People's implicit thoughts and attitudes are often quite different to those they report having consciously.

Most importantly, these implicit attitudes and beliefs drive a lot of our everyday behaviour and are activated so rapidly, and so subtly so as to affect what we do, say, and think without us noticing.

Psychologists have long known that we think and behave unconsciously a lot of the time. It is in fact very necessary - there are simply too many things happening in our day-to-day lives for us to attend consciously and deliberately to all of them.

The challenge has always been how to identify and measure these unconscious processes, and understand their dynamics in order to more effectively harness their potential.

Implicit tests are the most robust and well-validated tool with which to achieve this.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Why would an implicit test tell me something different from an old fashioned questionnaire?

Implicit tests do not measure the attitudes or beliefs that you are aware of. They measure the instinctive, rapidly activated, deep associations that underlie much of your everyday beliefs and behaviours. You may not even know you have many of them.

Q. Can the test be taught or practiced for?

No, even if you do the test a number of times, while your overall accuracy may improve very slightly, the test actually compares your implicit reactions across contrasting concepts and categories and so your relative score remains unchanged even after practice.

Q. What behaviours are driven by implicit thoughts and attitudes rather than conscious ones?

Many subtle and pervasive everyday behaviours are driven by our implicit associations; body language, verbal communication, eye contact, social distance, strategic task approach, caution and risk-taking, habits, routines, and social attitudes or opinions about people, groups, objects, products and places.

Q. Could a person's implicit and conscious traits or attitudes be the same?

Yes, often our conscious beliefs and attitudes are derived from our implicit ones, and in these instances, they may be the same. Quite often, however, they are different, and a questionnaire cannot measure implicit traits and attitudes if someone doesn't know what they are, or doesn’t want to reveal them.

Q. How is Psynapse priced?

We have a number of flexible and competitive pricing structures to meet your needs, from the smallest organisation to the largest. Please use the contact us link at the bottom of this page to find out more about our pricing options.

Q. Can the test be faked?

The test is virtually fake-proof because it assesses a persons instant, gut responses in a 700 millisecond response window - not long enough to self-censor or suppress your natural inclinations, even if you practice it a number of times.

Q. What if I'm unhappy about my implicit traits or attitudes? Can I change them?

Your implicit associations may often be quite different to your consciously held attitudes and beliefs. Sometimes they can come as a surprise. Don't be alarmed, it's ok to disagree consciously with your implicit attitudes.

It is important to remember that our implicit associations come about through our life experience and they can be changed. The first step in that process is to become aware of them to begin with, and to understand whether and how they affect your behaviour.

Psynapse can help you do that by assessing what your implicit attitudes and beliefs are, and explaining what your results mean.

Q. Is the test revealing things about me I may want to keep private?

The test measures your non-conscious, or automatic traits, preferences and behavioural tendencies. These may be things about yourself you were unaware of or things you may not want to reveal. However, knowing about these aspects of yourself is important.

Employers routinely screen applicants for bias and faking, and use personality and behavioural tests as one of many guides to inform their decision-making. Individuals can use these tests to learn more about their suitability for particular professional roles or environments.

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