The Implicit Association Test Evaluation

This assignment is solely written to evaluate the Implicit Association test that measures the strength of association between concepts. The test uses the subject’s response to make a conclusion of the subject’s attitude towards the kind of test being taken. There are several tests but I chose to do the Gender-Career Implicit Test.

I chose to do the Gender-Career Implicit Association Test for some few reasons. The major reason was to be able to evaluate my implicit attitudes towards the relationship between gender and career. I wanted to know if I’m really biased on the type of work that females and males are supposed to do. The other reason was to be able to determine if my implicit opinion was parallel to the public opinion. The public opinion associates career with the males and family with the females which unconsciously influences a person.

My results fascinated me because they were the same results that I expected. I had a vague expectation of the turnout and the results confirmed them. The results stated that I had a moderate automatic association for the male with career and female with family.  Although the biases of the career attitude seem to be a universal aspect, I think the results were accurate due to the following reasons; Male is considered the sole breadwinners in the family and therefore it is a universal attitude that most people associate men with career and women with the family. The other reason is that women in most cases are the sole caregivers and therefore most people do not associate them with careers but rather the family. It is also not astonishing that women prioritize family over career. Most women will want to marry men who earn more than they do. This is an unconscious bias but a reality in the society.

The test itself is accurate in measuring people’s biases. It uses an individual’s response to make a conclusion. The idea behind it is that a person will make a faster response when closely related items share the same input key. It is, therefore, accurate because it has minimized the order effect by giving more practice trials before the second pairing than the first pairing. This idea becomes true when a person interacts with the test. I was able to find out that when the word “male” and “career” shared the same input key, the response was easier to make than when the two words were separated. For instance, when the word “female” and “career” used the same input key. The other reason for accuracy is that the handedness of a person does not influence the result. People who have better eye-hand coordination will generally respond faster but there is no reason to think that they would be faster in one category pairing than the other.

 The weakness with this test is that it relies on the speed of response. It does not consider a person who may have a slow reading rate. This may significantly affect the results or even bring an error result. The results are also accurate because they prove that minute psychological stereotypes influence our overall behavior. The stereotypes that are common in our society influence our behavior to the point that one is not able to feel the influence. The test is also accurate since it simply relies on the feedback from the subject and not the experience. It would be experienced if there was a person who was taking the subject through the test and the person knew the behavior of the subject.

In conclusion, although the test has some few flaws, it is an efficient and accurate method of measuring the implicit attitude.