We all have implicit attitudes, attitudes that we are unaware of possessing (Fazio & Olson, 2003). However, Greenwald, Banaji, Nosek, and others (1998) developed a form of assessment that can pick up on and measure our unconscious attitudes, such as prejudice. This measure is known as the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The test measures the speed at which people associate pairs of concepts – such as black or white with good or bad. To take an IAT you must go through a progression of stages. For example if you were taking an IAT to measure your racial attitudes you would first sort black and white faces as quickly as you can. You do this by pressing a left-hand key (“e”) in response to black faces and a right-hand key (“i”) for white faces. Next, you categorize a set of words, left-hand key for positive words and right-hand key for negative words. The next stage gets a little more difficult, now you have to sort faces and words at the same time. So the left-hand key would be for black faces and positive words and the right-hand key for white faces and negative words. Then, in the final stage black faces would be paired with negative words and white faces with positive words. The test then measures the amount of time it takes you to respond to the pairings of black-bad/white-good in relation to black-good/white-bad. Your score is then presented to you showing the strength (slight, moderate, strong) and direction of your attitude (black-bad/white-good or black-good/white-bad).
The first test I chose to take was the Gender-Career IAT. My test results were generally consistent with my beliefs, however I would not have predicted them to be quite so strong. I knew I favored the family-female/career-male attitude, but I thought my attitudes were slighter to moderate in strength as opposed to strong. I guess I’m not really all that surprised by the result I got because I was raised in a home where my mom stayed home and my dad worked. My mom volunteered and did lots things, but she wasn’t a “career woman” per se. Not only is my immediate family like that, but that’s the situation for almost all the women in my distant family are well. So I grew up in an environment where the norm was for the mother to stay home and not work. The majority of my friends’ families followed the same practices, so even my experiences outside of my family supported this attitude. I, therefore, believe that the IAT is probably showing me my “true” attitude. Yet consciously, I want to have the best of both worlds, family and career. Ideally I want to become established in my career initially, then take some time off for family, but then most likely return to working eventually.
Completing the IAT did not really change my thinking about prejudice and stereotypes too much. If my result had been completely different from what I was expecting I probably would say otherwise, but since I had a feeling as to what results I would yield my thoughts stayed relatively the same. I did think it was interesting though because in another test I took about attitudes toward people with disabilities I, once again, basically knew what result I would get however I was off in the strength. The fact that my conscious beliefs never fully matched my implicit attitudes does say something. It reminds me of affective forecasting, how we can predict whether we like or dislike something but we are not as accurate at predicting the strength and duration of these feelings (Gilbert, 1998).
When I took the IAT for Gender-Career a second time, I went slightly slower and tried not to make any mistakes at all (I had made some the first time around). Even though I made zero mistakes my results did not change. Obviously I just associate family-female and career-male a lot quicker than career-female and family-male. I thought I was doing really well while taking it and that my result was going to be much more neutral, but I was wrong. Very wrong. Consequently, I believe that the IAT is a good measure of implicit attitudes. Maybe I could have changed them more if it was a different subject, but who knows… I didn’t have the time to take them all and more than once at that. I really enjoyed taking them though; I think they are fun and I do believe that there is truth to them!
Fazio, R. H., & Olson, M. A. (2003). Implicit measure in social cognition research: Their meaning and use. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 297-327.
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C. Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 617-638.
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