IAT Blog :)

And the song of the week is....*drum roll please*.... 

Now that THAT is established, on to the important stuff 

Are you prejudicial? Do you hold on to certain stereotypes? Most people, would say no. We as a society like to answer in a socially acceptable way so of course we would say no. The thing is, is that is not entirely true, most of us whether it be consciously or unconsciously are both prejudicial and have certain stereotypes that they hold on to. That's where the IAT or Implicit Associates Test comes in. 

The IAT was developed by Greenwald and Banaji and is used to uncover our unconscious feelings, preferences and beliefs. The IAT is taken online and participants are told to categorize words into 2 different categories. For example one of the tests I took was on Gender and Careers. The first task was to categorize names by either male or female by pressing E for girl or I for a male. Then, they switched it and E became male and I became female. Next you had to categorize words into either career (E) or family (I). Then like the male and female categorization, they switched. The next one had you press E for female OR career and I for male OR family. Finally they changed it so E was male or career and I was female or family. I also took the Skin Tone IAT which used the same format as the Gender and Career one, however used pictures of dark skinned faces and light faces and Good or Bad. 

For the Gender and Career Test I got "little or no association between Female and Male with Career and Family" For the Skin Tone Association Test  I got "slight automatic preference for light skin compared to dark skin." The results for the Gender and Career test I felt were pretty consistent with my conscious beliefs. I have never been one to associate certain careers with male or female connotations or believe in the whole "men work, women stay home" idea. Even as a kid (kindergarten) I would walk around saying how I was going to be an astronaut when I grew up and actually got in trouble that year for smacking a boy (his name was Miles) who said I couldn't. And unfortunately I realized that I do have a slight preference towards light skin faces. I have always grown up in relatively "white" communities and due to events in my past that I would rather not put into detail on the internet that has lead to intense PTSD, I have a hard time not being afraid if I see a guy with darker skin (darker as in any shade darker than me) at night. 
Looking back, I probably should have done different IATs that I didn't already know the answer to, because these two really didn't show me anything about myself that I didn't already know. Overall, I think that this is a really interesting test and I will definitely use it in the future.   

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Website where the IAT is https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html