After taking three of Project Implict's bias tests, I was lead to some interesting discoveries. The first test I took was the Weight IAT, which compared fat and skinny people. I'd like to think that I don't hold people's size against them regarding how I see them as people, despite this I scored a strong negative association with fat people. I found these results to be challenging, but understandable. I can still hold larger people with esteem, but view the intrinsic adverse heath risks in a negative light. Regardless, it's interesting to see that your opinion of individuals can be swayed subconsciously without really getting to know.
Because of this previous score, I was worried about the next one, the Weapons IAT, which checked for mental correlations between black people and weapons. To my relief, I received a slight association of white Americans with weapons as compared with black Americans. Having grown up in a predominantly white neighborhood and attending private Catholic school, I was worried I could have developed subconscious biases simply from not getting to know many people from other races on any level. However, I consider myself to be fairly open minded, which showed in the results.
The third test I choose was the Age IAT, which indicated no preference for young or old. I felt this was accurate, I don't feel like I feel any inherit value to age or lack thereof. I was surprised that the data skewed so heavy towards young people though, I understand that people are more likely to have positive opinions towards attractie people, and young people are more attractive, but there is something inherently nice about the elderly, perhaps a mental association with grandparents that makes it hard not to associate the good words with them.
In conclusion, I thought the activity with pretty interesting but to me it seemed there could be a lot of error, in particular which association pair comes first which effects speed simply because your mind associating the different sides to different things. Secondly, I felt like it was easy to make small mistakes that could have a large effect on the results.
Hey Greg,
ReplyDeleteI also took the Weight IAT with the notion that I did not have prejudices or judge people based on their weight. My results were that I had a slight automatic preference for thin people. When response times are so fast it may be hard to separate what words you associate with each body type and what society deems appropriate for each.