Literature Review Of The Implicit Association Test

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The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was first introduced in the scientific literature in 1998 by Anthony Greenwald, Debbie McGhee, Joyce Sherry, and Jordan Schwartz. The IAT measures attitudes and beliefs that people may be unwilling or unable to report. The IAT is also a computer-based test that measures how rapidly people are able to categorize various words and images, and it capitalizes on the fact that most of us identify words and images more rapidly when it come from closely related categories. The IAT is now widely used in social psychology research and is used to some level in clinical, cognitive, and developmental psychology research. The IAT indirectly assesses how closely people associate certain elements with each other, so in …show more content…
Prejudices can be defined as a prejudgment, or forming an opinion before becoming aware of the relevant facts of a case. Prejudice involves having negative attitudes and stereotyped beliefs about members of a particular group or race. For example, a person may hold prejudiced views towards a certain race, gender, etc. On the other hand, discrimination and prejudices are related and have some similarities to each other. Discrimination is defined as the behavior or actions, usually negative, towards an individual or group of people, especially on the basis of sex/race/social class, etc. One example of discrimination is Racial discrimination is when the non-white people were treated as the bad people and ugly people while whites was the perfect angles. Another example is age discrimination were a person discrimination against a particular person or group on the grounds of their age. Lastly, in this test discrimination is shown if the tester displays any strong connection between a socially define group and a specific set of …show more content…
One flaw of the IAT is that it is heavily depended on hand correlation and memory. Also, IAT effects are smaller with the picture stimuli than with word stimuli. The pictures can be objective and do not have explicit meaning as opposed to words that has a defiant meaning. An individual tester can applying their own meaning to picture that they cannot apply to word. The next weakness of the test is that the effects also are reduced with repeated administration. The test gets weaker with repeated testing as the tester gets use to the test their ability to fool the test increases. On the other hand, one strength of the test is that it do not give you enough time to think and that you will get a more honest answer from the tester since they don’t have time to filter what is the socially acceptable answer. All of these things contribute to the test’s ability to distinguish between socially define

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