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Introduction on implicit association test and explicit bias
Compare The Implicit Association Test
Compare The Implicit Association Test
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The Implicit Association Test is an exam designed to measure individual’s attitudes and beliefs of social psychology that people may be unwilling to report. The exam also measures the strength of a person automatic association between mental representation of memory and concepts such as religion, and race. This exam is asking you to test yourself to find your hidden bias of the different category that are provided for you. When asked to take this examination for my Psychology class I become very interested. Just after engaging in the activity I become very disgusted with the test because I wondered how can a test that display a few pictures and words dictate my inner feeling.
Needless to say it produced a result that I thought to be inaccurate.
I chose to participate in two IAT tests on the Project Implicit website. The website states Project Implicit was started by Tony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji as a way to virtually perform scientific testing. Project Implicit is a non-profit dedicated to exploring unconscious bias. The tests I took from the site focused on automatic preference of the elderly or young and gay or straight people. Each test required me to sort pictures and phrases using the “E” and “I” key. The first groupings were between the two groups of people, followed by two sets of words labeled “good” and bad”. After completing those two sets, groupings were combined and switched. For example, the first group was elderly and good words. The second round grouped elderly and bad words. At the end, results determined the group I was more inclined to.
The Project Implicit, Harvard Education is a non-profit organization that seeks to collect data on an individual’s subconscious chooses. The test that I took was the Race IAT (Implicit Association Test), which measures and shows an individual’s implicit belief and attitudes that one may not be unwilling to admit that they have (Teachman, Nock, 2011). So, this test was an attempt to see if I have biases that I do not really know about. This is interesting and scary at the same time. To have someone basically interpret your thoughts through a series of unrelated responses.
The first Implicit Association Test (IAT) that I took was whether I had a preference for Young people compared to Old people. I chose this IAT because I initially thought that I would have no preference for Young or Old people. Though, I knew I would have some mistakes, I still expected my results to have an equal preference for both young or old people. In addition, this IAT used four categories. The first two categories were images of either a Young or and Old face and the other two categories were the words good or bad. The good or bad categories has at least five words listed.
The IAT (Implicit Associations Test) is a test designed by Harvard to prove that implicit associations exist, despite our personal desire to insist that they do not. Implicit associations are involuntary connotations of objects or concepts that we hold but may not be aware of. Therefore, implicit associations are created through socialization, which is a process in which an individual learns and recreates skills, knowledge, values, motives, and roles appropriate to their position or group in society. Social cognition is how we interpret and apply information about other people which can be modified by implicit associations, but can also determine implicit associations.
Implicit Bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions unconsciously. (Kirwan, 2015) The implicit bias, which includes both favorable and unfavorable being personal, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or voluntary control. The implicit interaction subconscious
A substantial amount of educational and psychological research has consistently demonstrated that African American students underperform academically relative to White students. For example, they tend to receive lower grades in school (e.g., Demo & Parker, 1987; Simmons, Brown, Bush, & Blyth, 1978), score lower on standardized tests of intellectual ability (e.g., Bachman, 1970; Herring, 1989; Reyes & Stanic, 1988; Simmons et al., 1978), drop out at higher rates (e.g., American Council on Education, 1990; Steele, 1992), and graduate from college with substantially lower grades than White students (e.g., Nettles, 1988). Such performance gaps can be attributed to any number of factors, such as socioeconomic status, academic preparation, and educational opportunities; however, Steele (1997) pointed out that even when background factors are held constant, subsequent achievement remains lower for minority students. Moreover, much research in this area has focused on how African American students’ lack of motivation and negative attitudes contribute to their inferior academic performance (Ogbu, 1990); yet many Black students often report high educational aspirations (Fordham, 1996; Fine, 1991; Ogbu, 1987, 1990; Hauser & Anderson, 1991), even higher than White students of comparable class background (MacLeod, 1995). What remains certain is the urgent need to explain what accounts for the persistent academic underachievement of Black students.
Taking an Implicit association test may not be something that we would want to base any serious decisions off of; it is a useful tool in being able to learn about ourselves better. By being made aware that we may unconsciously hold views that we are not proud of, we can inoculate ourselves and make a personal change for the better.
An Implicit Association Test (Race) will be administered to students of national public school systems and DoDEA facilities, with parental consent. The study will take DoDEA high school facility children ages 14 to 18, and test at least 1000 for participation (n=1000). This means that at two DoDEA high school facilities will participate in the study.. The same IAT (Race) will be administered to two public schools with children ages 14 to 18 (n=1000). In order to participate, all the students from DoDEA facilities will have to have been enrolled in DoDEA facilities for all of their school aged careers and all public school students will also be required to have spent their school aged career within the public school system. One of the DoDEA high school’s ( n=500)and one of the public schools (n=500) will be held as a control group and all of the students from both schools will also be pre and post-tested before the beginning of the program, dur...
The validity of the test all hinges on the validity of the analogy in assessing analytical ability. While many other standardized tests have moved away from the analogy, the MAT is entirely made up of analogies, with the publishers arguing that th...
Implicit bias has negatively impacted our society, whether we realize it or not. Efren Perez(2016), a professor at Vanderbilt University, defines implicit bias as “an umbrella term for a variety of attitudes, beliefs, knowledge and stereotypes that we all carry to some degree. They tend to be automatically triggered, hard to control and can often influence what we say and do without our awareness” (para. 3). This has a negative impact on society because it can influence our viewpoints on important issues such as immigration, politics, and civil rights no matter how unbiased we think we are. Pérez(2016) explains “our mind picks up on patterns that we see in society, the media and other places and forms snap judgments before we have time to process all the information in a more deliberative and controlled manner” (para. 4). While we may not always view ourselves as prejudice or racist, implicit bias lies beneath the surface of our conscious and affects how we make
Implicit attitudes are positive and negative assessments that occur outside of one’s conscious cognizance and controls. The affirmative or adverse views, feelings, or actions towards individuals ...
According to Devine (1989), automatic processing involves the unconscious retrieval of obtained associations that develop through memory repetition; this process links with stimulus cues in the environment. The intense nature of automaticity is that an individual cannot escape or try to ignore the process (Devine, 1989). People build and enforce stereotypes through this automatic process and have no conscious control of memory retrievals. Human bodies take a lot of effort to function, but automatic processing requires little effort. People, therefore, mostly rely on automatic thinking, rather than controlled. This is why some researchers argue that automatic processing is why stereotyping is inevitable; because automaticity is easier, it does not mean controlled thinking cannot disband stereotypes (Devine, 1989). Controlled thinking is intentional and requires active participation of an individual. This proce...
What are attitudes? How are they formed, measured and changed? What degree of influence do they exert on behavior? What important effects does prejudice have on attitudes, and how is prejudice caused? These are all questions that are central to the study of social psychology and, by reviewing the findings of psychological research into these areas, this essay will attempt to provide a balanced explanation of the topic.
...o mind for that descriptor. Sheets were collected and responses written on the blackboard. Questions which followed included: "Which group received the most positive associations?" "The most negative?" "Why?" It seems few questions needed to be asked to precipitate discussion. Students subsequently expressed their hurt, fears and anger about prejudice from this activity and in their lives. Both students and faculty participating in this group rated the overall experience as highly positive. (Lasenza & Trout, 1990).
Possible Problems with Attempting to Measure Attitudes The question what problems might arise in trying to measure attitudes itself conjures up many complicated questions that seem tricky to answer. The complicated task is that we are all unique and have our individual differences. A basic assumption on measuring attitudes is that ‘a person’s attitude can be measured by asking questions about thoughts, feelings and likely actions toward the attitude object (Hoff and Vaughan, 1995, Chapter 5) From this assumption it is obvious that measuring attitudes is not directly observable. Even if we think we know someone’s attitude this does not mean we can predict their behaviour.