Implicit Attitudes Paper

An explicit attitude is an evaluation that someone can consciously say. However, implicit attitudes are evaluations that someone cannot consciously say. For example, a student would normally express that they enjoy school, which is an explicit attitude, but unconsciously, they may actually dislike school because of relating factors, such as waking up early, or having to stay up late and study. This would be described as an implicit attitude. Researchers want to measure these implicit attitudes because the attitudes help predict behavior. There are a couple methods used to measure implicit attitudes, including the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT measures how fast a person categorizes concepts (e.g., girls or boys) with an attribute (e.g., sensitive or insensitive). The researchers then measure the amount of time the person takes to pair each concept and attribute, which indicates how strongly the person associates the two (Hess & Pickett, 2016, p. 51).
I decided to take the “Asian-European American” IAT. I took the Asian-European American IAT because as soon as I saw the subject, it caught my attention. I related to it because my mother is Asian-American and my father is European-American, making this test the perfect one for me to take. At the beginning of the test, faces considered European- American and Asian-American were given to me and I had to place each one in the Asian or European category. Next, I was given …show more content…
I believe the IAT is a quick and easy way to measure implicit attitudes. Though, I do think that the instructions were a bit confusing. I did not fully understand what was happening and how I was being measured until I took the test a second time. However, I did feel stress when trying to categorize each picture as fast as I could. At some points, I forgot that I was supposed to be pairing the two subjects as fast as I could, or I would mess up once and get thrown off and miss