Racial Diversity Research Paper

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.

Minority administrators have an astronomically immense portion of Americans believing that minorities no longer face segregation in the work environment. The fact of the matter is that these examples of surmounting adversity are the exemption and not the tenet. They are more a consequence of the tirelessness, ability, desire, and resoluteness of these bellwethers than anything else. Numerous minorities have possessed the capacity to get access into the work environment, and conventionally move into lower and center level administration positions. Notwithstanding, by and sizably voluminous, the way to achievement deadlocks. In opposition to prominent feeling, minorities probing for achievement in the work environment consistently experience

By visiting the website called Project Implicit, I was able to take part in a study by participating in an online implicit association test otherwise known as IAT. This specific IAT asks participants to make a distinction between faces of people who are young and old. According to this website, the results for this specific test usually indicate that Americans prefer the faces of young people rather than old. After personally completing this IAT, my data suggest that I strongly prefer the faces of young people over old people.

The Implicit Association Test or IAT is a valuable tool that those in the criminal justice system use; often times during the hiring process candidates will be required to complete the IAT so that hiring officials can see if they have any unconscious bias. The IAT is still relatively new in terms of psychological research only being created in the 1990’s by psychologist Anthony Greenwald (Kaufman, 2011). Individuals who take the race portion of the test are shown pictures of Caucasian and African-American males or females, then are given positive or negative words that they associate with each race as fast as possible. After taking the test it measures the unconscious bias that everyone has deep down (Kaufman, 2011).

The Implicit Tests that I chose were Weight and Weapons. Both tests are designed to show one’s subconscious and conscious feelings regarding stereotypes and measure them to the overall results of all that took the same test.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was done again in relation to race by Project Implicit or PI which supports a collaborative network of researchers interested in basic and applied research concerning implicit social cognition and hosts data collection for many online research projects worldwide, in addition to providing demonstration IATs, such as the Race IAT, for racial implicit biases for educational uses (Xu, et. al.). This test was taken online by 2 million people nationally and researchers suggest they are more liberal and younger demographic, indicating that if the older and more right wing Americans took the test at higher rates the results would differ. “The Project Implicit test takers trend younger than average, as well as towards liberal political beliefs and higher levels of education. But other research has suggested that older Americans past the age of 65, in particular, tend to have higher IAT (D) scores” (Xu). For unknown reasons the rate of racial bias was the highest in the southeast and eastern portion of the country, which could possibly come from the historical racial issues that occurred in these areas for decades, such as civil war history. The bottom line is that research suggests that white Americans including police officers have a high possibility of subconscious negative feelings towards minorities supported by a chart from The Reverse Racism Effect article by Lois James depicting the negative connotations felt by 96% of white participants in the IAT

Implicit bias is bias in one’s judgment or behavior that results from one’s unconscious associations. In order to thoroughly discuss implicit bias, implicit associations must first be examined. Implicit associations refer to one’s unconscious associations between a group and how one feels about said group. For example, a person may subconsciously associate straight people as “normal” and homosexuals as “wrong”. They may have this unconscious association even if they do not express this opinion

Research centers for the study of racial bias have developed experimental studies to help understand how race can, for instance, influence a police officer to shoot an unarmed suspect. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one of the most commonly used tests for this study. IAT was developed by three scientists, Tony Greenwald (University of Washington), Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University), and Brian Nosek (University of Virginia) (“ProjectImplicit”). Their “Project Implicit” program was designed to identify our societal biases through the association of faces (black and white) with words (good and bad). This program uses a scoring algorithm that can identify those who are faking the test with approximately 75% accuracy (Cvencek et al.).

The subconscious mind develops unconscious bias in daily life, often at a very young age, causing people to make automatic decisions based on selective attention, threat of stereotyping, or intentional blindness.

Knowing, understanding, and being aware of personal biases is the first step in the development of plans or strategies overcoming biases. As nurses we must recognize and be more sensitive to the care provided to patients and understand that differences do exist in and between the differing races, cultures, and ethnic groups (Giger, 2013, p. 3). The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is used to identify and provide an awareness to biases that are consciously or unconsciously present in an individuals actions and beliefs (Project Implicit, 2011). After completing the Race IAT, Gender-Career IAT and Religion IAT, I will discuss the prejudices, biases, and stereotypical thinking present in my life and share what steps can be taken to reduce or eliminate

The first Implicit Associations Task I took was to evaluate my social attitudes when comparing different individual’s weight. Specifically, I had to label individuals “fat” or “thin” depending on the picture shown on the screen. As the level of the study escalated, I had to match fat individuals with negative attributes by pressing the letter “e” and match thin individuals and positive attributes by pressing the letter “i”, or vice versa. Because I felt I was not being biased when answering the questions, at the end of the seven tasks I was not surprised when my results showed that I have no preference between the two individuals. Even though I agree with the results since I do not discriminate individuals based on their external appearance,

You can also recognize implicit stereotypes and implicit prejudices. An implicit stereotype is a hidden association between how you perceive a certain group and the characteristics they possess. An explicit stereotype is an association that you know you make when you think of a certain group and the characteristics they possess. An implicit prejudice however is a hidden association between a group and how you feel

The IAT is basically a test that gauges the strength of an individual’s implicit prejudices. The experimenter asks a participant to push corresponding buttons when a word or an image is projected on screen. They then measure the “association” speed (pushing the button) a participant make. According to Anthony Greenwald, “If two concepts are associated, it is easy to give the same response to exemplars…” (Erwin, 2007). So if an individual has a positive view of a certain group, it will be easy for the person to associate that group to positive words or concepts. If the person’s view of another group is negative, it will automatically associate it with negative concepts.

Many managers do not realize that they are being unfairly prejudiced on their work place and decisions. When managers are being unfairly prejudiced they become blinded from recognizing workers that have a good possibility for achievement. Although most managers believe that they’re ethical and unbiased; The Implicit Association Test is best to take and expose their implicit