Participant Observer Blog

Social psychologists have developed many tools to be able to research how people make inferences about others. The Implicit Associates Test (IAT) is one of these tools; this test is taken on-line. The website allows you to choose what type of preference you’d like to make; for example age, gender or weight. For this blog I decided to take the age preference test and the weight preference test. The results show that I have no automatic preference between old and young people; but I do have a slight automatic preference for thin people. These results surprised me a little bit because I actually thought I would have a slight preference for young people since I am around them more often. I believe that I obtained the result of no preference between young and old people because my perception of young and old people is different than the one on the test. Even though my mom is not old I categorize her under the old people category, the test does not account for this difference. I believe that I obtained the result of a slight automatic preference towards thin people because I am a schematic about my weight and notice it in other people as well. I believe that the IAT shows both our “true” attitude and cultural associations we may have. I believe that it shows our “true” attitude because we are conscious of the choices we make both during the test and in everyday life; however culture puts many of those choices out there. Completing the IAT did make me think of stereotypes differently. I will try to be more aware of how I perceive people that are overweight because I may have a negative perception of them without even noticing it.

I attempted to go to the IAT website and change the results of my weight preference. However I was not very successful. I still got a slight preference for thin people. I wish I could have the numerical score because I am sure that I was probably able to lower that score, just not enough. When I retook the IAT I focused mainly on the part when fat and good are paired and making sure I did not make any mistakes when either of those categories popped up. I believe I did reduce my number of mistakes.

References:

Greenwald, A. G., & Farnham, S. D. (2000). Using the Implicit Association Test to measure self-esteem and self-concept. Journal of Personality and Social psychology, 79,1022-1038.

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 1464-1480.

Fazio, R. H., & Olson, M. A. (2003). Implicit measures in social cognition research: Their meaning and use. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 297-327.