How do implicit attitudes influence how we respond to Other?
Individuals’ mechanical systems for evaluating the world developed over the course of evolutionary history. Such mental operations provide tools for understanding the circumstances, assessing the important concepts, and heartening behavior without having to think or actually thinking at all. These automated preferences are called implicit attitudes.
“Implicit attitude is defined as unacknowledged attitudes external to a person’s awareness which nonetheless have measurable effects on people’s response times to stimulations” (Grinnell, 2009). This is a topic of importance on reading within the field of social psychology.
According to Haddock & Maio (2004), “The Attitude conception has long formed an essential paradigm in social psychology”. Asch (1940) argued that the main route “in influence is not change in attitudes toward an individual but rather change in the definition and meaning of the individual” (Wood, 2000). Many people have the same feeling when it comes to questions related to the death penalty, prayer in schools, violence on television regulation, and political issues.
Psychologist’s definitions of attitudes include assessing problems, persons, or actions. These assessments are regularly affirmative or adverse, and unclear. Humans have established attitudes about such issues, and these attitudes influence his or her beliefs as well as behavior. Because people are largely unaware of his or her implicit attitudes, they can have difficulty changing these attitudes.
Implicit attitudes are positive and negative assessments that occur outside of one’s conscious cognizance and controls. The affirmative or adverse views, feelings, or actions towards individuals ...
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The method primarily used throughout research was the Implicit Association Test (IAT). This test is a measure used in the study of social psychology that is used to predict a person’s first association between different mental representations in one’s memory. In these particular studies the IAT is used to detect one’s behaviors, judgements, and decisions suggestive of ethnic and racial discrimination (Oswald, Mitchell, Blanton, Jaccard, & Tetlock, 2007). This test is usually done through technology. In the race IAT, participants would sit in front of the computer and be shown a variety of black faces and white faces. They were also told that one button on the keyboard is associated with the word “old” (negative),
The Project Implicit, Harvard Education is a non-profit organization that seeks to collect data on an individual’s subconscious chooses. The test that I took was the Race IAT (Implicit Association Test), which measures and shows an individual’s implicit belief and attitudes that one may not be unwilling to admit that they have (Teachman, Nock, 2011). So, this test was an attempt to see if I have biases that I do not really know about. This is interesting and scary at the same time. To have someone basically interpret your thoughts through a series of unrelated responses.
...onson, E., Wilson, T.D., & Akert, R.M. (2013). Social Psychology (8th ed.). New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc.
I chose to participate in two IAT tests on the Project Implicit website. The website states Project Implicit was started by Tony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji as a way to virtually perform scientific testing. Project Implicit is a non-profit dedicated to exploring unconscious bias. The tests I took from the site focused on automatic preference of the elderly or young and gay or straight people. Each test required me to sort pictures and phrases using the “E” and “I” key. The first groupings were between the two groups of people, followed by two sets of words labeled “good” and bad”. After completing those two sets, groupings were combined and switched. For example, the first group was elderly and good words. The second round grouped elderly and bad words. At the end, results determined the group I was more inclined to.
The first Implicit Association Test (IAT) that I took was whether I had a preference for Young people compared to Old people. I chose this IAT because I initially thought that I would have no preference for Young or Old people. Though, I knew I would have some mistakes, I still expected my results to have an equal preference for both young or old people. In addition, this IAT used four categories. The first two categories were images of either a Young or and Old face and the other two categories were the words good or bad. The good or bad categories has at least five words listed.
Musher-Eizenman, D. R., Holub, S. C., & Arnett, M. (2003). Attitude and Peer Influences on
Implicit and explicit biases are related mental constructs. For many years, even dating back to our great’s ancestor, people always have automatic judge people, places, and things. We were all given five senses, knowing how the brain works, we choose to use our conscious actions to judge. Without awareness, we usually act on those judgments. There are two types of judgments consciously and unconsciously.
In this specific “Implicit-association test” white individuals were asked to categorize a word that pops up on a computer screen as either positive or negative after a picture of either a black or white face showed up. The results showed that white individuals allocated negative words much faster to blacks than white faces.
Taking an Implicit association test may not be something that we would want to base any serious decisions off of; it is a useful tool in being able to learn about ourselves better. By being made aware that we may unconsciously hold views that we are not proud of, we can inoculate ourselves and make a personal change for the better.
The IAT (Implicit Associations Test) is a test designed by Harvard to prove that implicit associations exist, despite our personal desire to insist that they do not. Implicit associations are involuntary connotations of objects or concepts that we hold but may not be aware of. Therefore, implicit associations are created through socialization, which is a process in which an individual learns and recreates skills, knowledge, values, motives, and roles appropriate to their position or group in society. Social cognition is how we interpret and apply information about other people which can be modified by implicit associations, but can also determine implicit associations.
According to Devine (1989), automatic processing involves the unconscious retrieval of obtained associations that develop through memory repetition; this process links with stimulus cues in the environment. The intense nature of automaticity is that an individual cannot escape or try to ignore the process (Devine, 1989). People build and enforce stereotypes through this automatic process and have no conscious control of memory retrievals. Human bodies take a lot of effort to function, but automatic processing requires little effort. People, therefore, mostly rely on automatic thinking, rather than controlled. This is why some researchers argue that automatic processing is why stereotyping is inevitable; because automaticity is easier, it does not mean controlled thinking cannot disband stereotypes (Devine, 1989). Controlled thinking is intentional and requires active participation of an individual. This proce...
Implicit biases have been shown to effect discrimination in medical treatment, hiring, job promotions, and criminal justice decisions. As a medical professional, knowing one's biases is important so that they do not affect the quality of a client's treatment. Though it is important to address implicit biases, it can be difficult to identify one's biases because they are subtly presented through behavior in our daily lives. Project Implicit offers evaluations that measure the strengths of association between two concepts. The results from the evaluations can help provide an insight into one's implicit biases.
Attitudes can be formed in a number of different ways. The three component model consists of Affective, Cognitive and behavioural based attitude experiences and has been a main area of focus among social psychologists. These three components are held within most attitudes, however not all attitudes are equal and different experiences can change the ...
... middle of paper ... ... Journal of Applied Psychology 92 (2007): 1332–356. Print. The.
According to Baron, Byrne & Suls in their book Attitudes: Evaluating the social world. (1989) they defined the term Social Psychology as “the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations”. (p. 6). There are many concepts of social perception, two of these that will be looked at in this essay are Implicit Personality Theory and stereotypes. Implicit personality theory describes the beliefs, biases and assumptions, that an individual uses when he or she forms impressions on a stranger based on limited information. The way we form impressions and the different conclusions we make about other people based upon our individual impressions is also part of this theory. One of the first people to investigate how people form impressions was Solomon Asch in the 1940’s in his experiment ‘Forming Impressions of Personality' he was interested in how people form impressions and if certain traits affected peoples impressions. A good example of Implicit personality theory is if someone who is considered unpredictable they may be considered dangerous. The second Concept of Social Psychology that will be considered is stereotypes. Cardwell (1996) described stereotypes as “...A fixed, over generalized belief about a particular group or class of people.” may have beliefs and thoughts on different social groups and individual people and how they should act, and believe that all people in that group conform and have the same characteristics as the rest. By using stereotypes, it helps us simplify how we think of the social world as having a stereotype reduces our thinking process when we meet new people. An example of stereotyping is saying that all French people wear berets and have garlic a...