Implicit doping attitude and athletes' accuracy in avoiding unintentional doping when being offered beverages with banned performance-enhancing substances

Objectives: Implicit doping attitude reflects the strength of one's automatic or unconscious evaluation of doping. This cross-societal study examined how implicit doping attitude predicted athletes' accuracy in avoiding unintentional doping. Design: A real-time experimental design with cross-sectional data from three geographical regions. Methods: A total of 681 athletes (M_age = 28.21, SD = 8.43; female = 47.1 %) from Hong Kong (N = 177), Australia (N = 164) and the United Kingdom (N = 340) completed two real-time experimental tasks for measuring their implicit doping attitude (a brief single-category implicit association test) and the accuracy of avoiding unintentional doping (a novel canned beverage sorting task). Results: Implicit doping attitude was significantly and negatively (β = − 0.09, p < .05, R² = 0.03, 95 % CI of β = − 1.64 to − 0.15) associated with athletes' accuracy in avoiding unintentional doping by screening out beverages with banned performance-enhancing substances. This association was maintained when we statistically controlled for the effects of society. Conclusions: Athletes with a positive implicit doping attitude were less accurate in determining whether unknown beverages with the possible presence of banned performance-enhancing substances should be consumed. The negative association between implicit doping and athletes' accuracy in avoiding unintentional doping appeared to be consistent across societies.