Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Implicit Association Test

The two tests I took were the Weight IAT and the Asian IAT. The Weight IAT requires the ability to recognize faces of people who are obese and people who are thin and also reveals the automatic preference for thin people with respective to obese people. The Asian IAT requires the ability to recognize White and Asian faces, and the images of American and foreign places. Both tests require three tasks - two questionnaires and the actual test in between. The actual tests asks you to sort words and pictures based on the categories they give you. The test must be done as quickly as possible while making the fewest mistakes as possible.

For the Weight IAT, the categories were Good, Bad, Fat People, and Thin People. The items for the Good and Bad category were words, while the categories for Fat and Thin People showed images.
Good - Joy, love, peace, wonder, etc.
Bad - Agony, terrible, horrible, etc.
My result states that I have a "strong automatic preference for thin people to fat people". 25% (2nd highest) of other web respondents gotten the same results as me. The top result was "moderate automatic preference for thin people compared to fat people" (27%). Personally, I am somewhat bewildered by my results as I hang out with both thin and fat people. I don't think I really have a strong preference for thin people to fat people, but it was very interesting to see how this test made me seem different from that I thought I was.

For the Asian IAT, the categories were Asian American, European American, Amiercan, and Foreign. The items were all images of the respective categories.
My results for this test suggests "a slight association of Asian Americans with American and European American with Foreign compared to European American With American and Asian with Foreign". Unlike the previous test, my results was the 3rd lowest percentage (9%) compared to other respondents. I still am baffled once again by my results because I feel like it isn't true. If I am reading my results correctly, I feel like I associate with more foreigners than my own race. Then again, it was still interesting to see how I am classified by this test.

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