Weight Implicit Association Study

The purpose of this study was to examine if media exposure correlates with an individual’s implicit associations of weight. For the experiment, twenty-six participants completed a survey on media exposure and a weight implicit association test. The results concluded that there was no correlation between the survey and IAT scores. Between survey and IAT scores, media exposure was not correlated with implicit associations. From these results, the weight implicit association test is not measuring an individual’s exposure to media.

The amount of individuals in the world population that are obese or overweight is constantly increasing and has become a global trend (Ata & Thompson, 2010). Even though as a whole the world is becoming more overweight, …show more content…
The IAT measures the implicit associations or attitudes an individual has, but it does not include explicit associations, therefore other surveys are used to test the explicit measures. The implicit associations are underlying and potentially unknown to the participant, while the explicit associations are expressed and known to the participant. The research completed by Anselmi et al. collected results from male and female participants who were overweight, normal weight, and obese. The participants completed the weight IAT as well as three other tests to study explicit measures: a question asking their preference for fat vs. thin, and to rate how cold or warm they felt about overweight people. The results concluded that there was a preference for thin people among all weights, but there was only an anti-fat bias among thin individuals. In this study, the implicit association test was examining an individual’s perception of their body mass and the exposure to fat biases. The weight IAT particularly focuses on weight biases the participants could have based on their exposure to those