Participant Observer Blog-IAT

Stereotypes are a negative aspect of group relations that often result in harmful beliefs about other people. They are beliefs that associate an entire group of people with certain traits. These traits can be positive or negative, but they often affect the ways in which we interact with the people they are associated with. Sorting people into groups is an automatic process that we, as perceivers, participate in every day. Doing so and having stereotypes available about groups saves us time and effort by allowing us to use people's group memberships to make inferences about them. However, we often underestimate the differences between people in another group, leading us to apply sometimes negative connotations to a group as a whole and therefore behave as such.

The Implicit Associations Test (IAT), developed by Greenwald et al. (1998), explores unconscious stereotypes that we hold without even realizing when they are activated or how they affect our behavior (Bargh, 1997). That is, there are implicit association and stereotypes that are activated automatically, even in those who claim to not be prejudiced. The IAT measures these implicit stereotypes for many factors, such as race, sexual orientation, weight, and political affiliation. It does so by presenting positive and negative words as well as stimuli associated with the factors to be measured, and associating the stimuli in various ways. For instance, during the IAT test on race, positive words are first grouped with pictures of European-American people, and negative words are grouped with African-American people. Then, the groups are reversed (European-Americans are associated with negative words and African-Americans are associated with positive words). The test taker has to press a certain key when a stimuli from one group is presented and press a different key when a stimuli from the other group is presented. The IAT determines the user's implicit associations by measuring how quickly he or she responds to stimuli based on how they are grouped. That is, a person who may prefer European-Americans to African-Americans may be faster at associating European-American stimuli with positive words and African-Americans with negative words, and pressing the corresponding keys, than vice versa.

I personally did the Race and Sexual Orientations IATs because I thought race in particular would be interesting after reading about racism in our last chapter. The test results on the race IAT were actually the opposite of what I expected, while the results of the sexual orientation IAT were just what I predicted. I think the results may have been different than I had expected for the race test because of the order the stimuli were presented in. That is, the second groupings presented may have been affected by the fact that I had already associated the races presented with the opposite word categories. This may have also affected the sexual orientation test that I took.

I think that the IAT is showing my "true" attitude. That is, the associations that I am not even aware that I have are brought to light by the fact that it is easier for me to associate certain groups with either positive or negative words, indicating my inherent preference for one group over the other. The IAT made me think about preferences very differently. That is, it made me realize that we have inherent preferences that we ourselves are not even aware of. These can affect our behavior and attitudes about others, which is why it is important that we are aware of our preferences so that we can try to address and even change them to create more positive group relations.

I went back and retook the sexual orientation IAT to analyze how the results changed if I were to alter my responses. I decided to make quick responses when positive words were associated with straight people and delayed responses when negative words were associated with gay people. This is to test the theory that we are quicker to associate positive ideas than negative ideas with things we like. The results were consistent with this theory, stating that I had a strong preference for straight people over gay people. This, along with my true results, indicates that the IAT is a strong indicator of our implicit stereotypes.

Bargh, J. A. (1997). The automaticity of everyday life. In R. S. Wyer, Jr. (Ed.), The automaticity of everyday life: Advances in social cognition (Vol. 10, pp. 1-61). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Implicit Association Test. (2010, March 4). Retrieved from Project Implicit website: https:// implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/takeatest.html