African American Implicit Attitudes

“Implicit attitude is defined as unacknowledged attitudes external to a person’s awareness which nonetheless have measurable effects on people’s response times to stimulations” (Grinnell, 2009). This is a topic of importance on reading within the field of social psychology.

discusses the results of a Implicit Association Test which measures a persons automatic association between mental representation of objects in the memory. Nearly 88 percent of the white race who took the Implicit Association Test show inherent racial bias. They have found when white people carry a implicit racial bias that they subconsciously prefer white people over black people in areas such as employment and academic. People don't even realize that they have a subconscious biases against a certain race. Which can affect how they interact with them. America still has a problem with race, The Civil War ended many years ago but the war between races still exist . Once we acknowledge the truth behind inherent racial bias we can move towards

The main purpose of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is to understand social cognition in individuals. Furthermore, the IAT measures individual differences in implicit attitudes, stereotypes, and self-esteem, which are an extension of its original use of intergroup attitudes. The IAT is used under several applications including clinical, developmental, marketing, health, legal, and its main usage involves implicit social cognition. Hundreds of studies of psychological processes have used the IAT and its measurements due to its success. The IAT’s development started through psychologists that created computer based measures of unconscious cognition after microcomputers made it possible to measure mental computation in milliseconds in the

For The Implicit Association Task (IAT) assignment, I began with the test titled, Weight ('Fat - Thin' IAT). This IAT requires that ability to distinguish people who are obese and people who are thin. It often reveals an automatic preference for thin people relative to fat people. This test included associated “good” and “bad” words, such as, joyful and ugly to a silhouette sized person that was either thin or obese. There are some questions about beliefs, attitudes, and opinions, and some standard demographic questions.

Uzogara, Lee, Addou, and Jackson (2014) conducted a study that investigated perceptions of skin tone discrimination among Adult African American men. The study was conducted using two different groups of people. The in group were those individuals in the

What are some common perceptions of Africa? Poverty, primitivism, inferior? These are some of the most misunderstood stereotypes of Africa. In Laura Green article the “Negative Racial Stereotypes and their Effect on Attitudes towards African-Americans” she explain that Stereotypes are "cognitive structures that contain the perceiver 's knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about human groups" . Stereotypes of Africa and Africans can be dated back to slavery. Slavery is a large contributor to the development of stereotypes about Africans. Western societies have portray Africans as being primitive and inferior. How has western stereotypes help to instill a rather one sided story about Africa and Africans? The perception an individual holds in western societies about Africa and African societies is large attributed towards how the media portrays Africa. For example Hollywood, their movies convey Africans as being primitive and the country as underdeveloped. I am not concluding that the area that those specific movies was shot in isn’t underdeveloped but rather that these movies convey a one sided story about Africa. The media plays a significantly large role because it’s a way for individuals to visualize Africa. This then allows the media to portray Africa the way they see it, rather than the way it really is. The compelling believes held by western societies about Africa and Africans is largely due to the media, which can be seen as artwork, movies and advertisements.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is performed to reveal aspects and traits about a person that they would not be able to admit about themselves if asked. How people act on the outside can often deceive others, but when it comes to this test it is hard to hide the unconscious feelings. This test goes deeper in the mind and thoughts, perhaps more than the person knew about themselves. The test requires quick responses, while also using compatible conditions and incompatible conditions to try to trick the mind. For example, compatible conditions would be whites associated with a positive word and blacks associated with a negative word and incompatible would be vice versa. The basis of the IAT is to measure whether a person has higher or lower

In contemporary Australian society, blatant racial prejudice has become socially undesirable (Dunn, Forrest, Burnley, & McDonald, 2004). This does not mean that those beliefs and attitudes have become extinct, but instead, it has changed into a new form of racial prejudice that is inherent and subtle (Willard, Isaac, & Carney, 2015) and leads to a differentiation between groups, that manifests unconsciously as cultural intolerance (Brewer & Kramer, 1985; Chaxel, 2015; Dunn et al., 2004; Hewstone & Greenland, 2000; Hewstone, Rubin, & Willis, 2002; Willard et al., 2015). The contributing factors to these manifestations come from the intergroup relationship themes of identity, stereotyping and ethnocentrism.

Research demonstrates that cognitive processes trigger implicit stereotyping and affective processes trigger implicit evaluation; inferring independence. Amodio and Devine (2006) conducted several implicit association tests (IATs), concluding that stereotyping and evaluation were uncorrelated. However their finding of a double dissociation implies a link, the former being implicated in semantic learning and memory, and the latter in affective types.

After taking the implicit attitude test my perceptions change slightly. Sometimes people have inherent miss conception that you think that are minor, but they are inside of you without probably not being aware. While I was taking this test in many instances I was neutral, but I made decisions according to what I was seeing at the moment. This test has assisted me in being more self-aware about other cultures that sometimes you have not provided services to such as Muslim or Arab. Memories came into my mind when seeing different pictures. There were moments that I could not relate to due to that I had to stop to think. The test results slightly surprise me. This was because it never cross in my mind that somewhere around my head there is some

Of the two automatic processing I relate strongly to stereotypes than I do attitudes, but however I watch how people interact with their environments. There is many reason why people will stay them use stereotypes for engaging and that is due to social media, which includes News broadcast, Facebook, Radio, and etc. These are also the major reason why we still have racism today. They pump subliminal messages to us every day in all shapes and forms. When I do use my attitude to engage in a person, it’s sometime felt with a gut feeling regardless of the persons color, ethicist or gender.

I took 3 of the implicit association test. The first one I took was the gender test. According to this type of test my results said that I had a slight automatic association for males with science and females for liberal art occupation. Also I had a strong preference for thin people. I don't agree with the result because I believe that the same potential that women have in liberal art males have it too and vice versa. I think if I had skipped the reading the theme or background of it before I wouldn’t have gotten the results I got. Additionally my culture might have influence the results. Since, it’s common for a male to lean towards science and female to lean towards liberal arts. The second one was the light skinned/ dark skinned. It stated

The first assignment in our Cultural Pluralism course was to take part in several individual studies as part of the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT). Each of the studies measures a person’s attitudes and beliefs that they may not be willing or unable to express and to write about our experience. For some individuals, taking these types of tests would be possibly a little unsettling. As for myself, I was very sure that I had a strong understanding of who I am and what I believe, so I thought the results would not be very surprising. Since bias can occur at any phase of research, including data collection I allowed the program to randomly choose three individual studies so I could avoid the issue of potential bias by selecting only the ones that I had a personal interest in. Allowing the program to choose would also ensure that I would get my “true” results regarding how I really looked at issues because I wouldn’t have any way of knowing how I would answer the questions prior to the study. The first study measured my automatic association of the concepts “female” and “males” with the concepts of “lead” and “support.” The data suggested that I had a strong automatic association of Male with lead and female with support. No surprise there since I have always association lead or leadership with the males in my life such as my father and husband. They were the strong ones, who directed the family in all matters of importance. My father was the “head” of the household and

The IAT is a passable type of measure that can be utilized to assess any associations among pairs of concepts (Gawronski, & Houwer, n.d.). IAT can also be utilized to measure pair of objects or categories; referring to their preferences; example criminal vs non-criminal (Gawronski, & Houwer, n.d.). A typical example regarding stereotypes association between yellow and red people, and the attributes of being musician vs intelligent may substitute the evaluative attribute with a semantic dimension assessing the semantic association (Gawronski, & Houwer, n.d.). Measurements such as IAT, implicit and explicit measures, are valuable tools to measure latent traits; for example stereotypes, biases, and heuristics. It is evident that all these measurements

The topic of research shows the individual’s behavior in terms of implicit in-group bias. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used to measure the individual differences in cognition, whilst considering the research of Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. K. L (1998). T, where participants were asked to categorize the names under the label of ‘Blacks’ and ‘Whites’. Then the participants had to categorize certain words under the labels of ‘Pleasant’ or ‘Unpleasant’. Therefore portraying certain attributes, where in two categories are merged together and the IAT is measured, thus being the main focus for this experiment. The performance measured the differences of implicitly associated with the attributes of various concepts. The results exhibited implicit cognition that cannot be drawn by explicit measures. A similar study by Russell H. Fazio and Michael A. Olson, conducted an implicit measures test on social cognition to see the constructs of implicit measures, as to explicit measures in different underlying conditions. This was based on various attitudes in the pervasiveness of literature. This was because they wanted a theoretical perspective on several stimuli based on attitudes as well as the literature point of it.