I promise I'm Not As Racist As It Says.

Holy Moley, okay, these IAT's (Greenwald et al. 1998) are kicking my butt. The IAT's (Greenwald et al. 1998) are tests developed by Harvard that are designed to test the implicit associations you have for certain groups or stimuli. To test these things, they basically just have you make quick judgments of things to test your reaction times between certain things. My first test was the racial IAT (Greenwald et al. 1998), and the very first thing they have you do in the test is describe your demographic information including your race, age and the like, which I feel should have been placed last after all of the data was collected, because it could have very easily influenced my results due to my ingroup bias (Capozza & Brown, 2000; Scheepers et al., 2006) as a white male, of course I am going to have a preference toward European Americans if you remind me that I am myself of European decent. I also took the body weight test, which compares fat and skinny people. I definitely already knew my automatic preference towards the thin side, since I identify myself as athletic and in being athletic I am thin(ner). My racial test was a bit disturbing, as it said I had a moderate preference to the European American faces, but I could attribute that to the fact that I am white myself and have a preference to things similar to myself. I didn't like seeing that results however, as I do believe that race is irrelevant to anything besides the amount of pigment a persons skin has. I don't think that taking these tests will change how I felt about those who are a different race then I am, and it definitely won't change how I feel about people who are obese. In the racial issue, as a student I am given data, stories, news, and plenty of other information that allows me to understand, intellectually at least, that the color of ones skin really plays no difference in who the person is. However, it is my personal belief that while obesity is sometimes a side effect of things out of the control of an individual such as an injury or an illness, but this is not the case for most people. The cause of obesity in most people today (in my belief) in the United States is an increasingly sugary fatty diet and an increasingly sedentary life style where people are just “too busy” to exercise each day or attempt to eat better.

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References

Capozza, D., & Brown, R. (2000). Social Identity processes: Trends in theory and research. London: Sage.

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schawartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.

Scheepers, D., Spears, R., Doosje, B., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2006). The social functions of ingroup bias: Creating, confirming, or changing social reality. European Review of Social Psychology, 17, 359-396