Implicit Association Test Essay

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.

When I was taking the IAT I didn’t realize how much hesitation I would make between the faces. To clarify, some of the older faces did not have many wrinkles on their face, so I would mistake their face with a younger one. Another thing that I noticed was that I would panic when I thought that I was taking too long so my fingers would just press the key involuntarily. This became more common, when the four categories were divided into two groups. The groups however, changed two times. To illustrate the first group match up would be “old” and “good” to be grouped together and “young” and “bad” to be together. Then the groups would switch with one another and the place of where the

I did not really believe that it was accurate until I took the tests. I accurately relied on my explicit attitudes that I never thought about what I subconsciously thought of. Taking the IAT’s allowed me to see a different perspective, moreover, even though I had an explicit attitude for both tests, I still got different results. In the textbook, it states that we can have both explicit and implicit attitudes toward the same topic (p. 169). Furthermore, taking the IAT’s allowed me to notice my implicit and explicit attitudes toward the same topic and how it contradicted to what I had initially