Implicit association
Implicit association of able-disabled persons
Implicit and explicit attitudes sometimes conflict with one another due to factors such as
subtle and overt prejudices. Automatic or implicit attitudes which root primarily from our
childhood years are harder to change than our explicit attitudes and usually can only be changed
through practice and forming new habits (Myers, Spencer, Jordan, 2009). Implicit attitudes are a
result from beliefs that people are either unwilling or unable to recognize and are usually
associated with fear, meaning it is not a conscious decision to have that particular perspective.
On the other hand, explicit attitudes are the easier of the two to change through education as it is
associated with the frontal cortex of the brain, which is responsible for conscious thinking
(Myers et al., 2009).
There are numerous implicit attitudes that are commonly explored within the IAT website
as well as other studies. They include people’s preferences of white people over black people,
young people over elderly people, men being associated with science and careers while women
get labeled under liberal arts and are family oriented (Nosek, Banaji, Greenwald, 2002). There is
a test called the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that typically demonstrates implicit attitudes. On
the IAT website there is a list of many different types of social prejudices issues ranging from
sexuality preferences, age preferences as well as religious preferences. Participants use one key
on a keyboard to respond to words referring to positive attributes and to words or pictures
referring to the topic being tested, and another key referring to negative attributes. This
procedure is then reversed with the keys meaning the opposite of what they did in the previous
questions. Implicit attitudes were rated by the speed at which people were able to identify the
words or pictures under a positive or negative category.
Implicit association
Implicit and explicit attitudes usually do not mirror one another. What somebody thinks
they feel about a certain group, and how they actually feel about that group is more often than
not, different. This is true with the white versus black IAT demonstration where black people in
the experiment had explicit attitudes towards favoring black people over white people, but their
implicit attitudes described something else (Nosek et al., 2002). Implicit measures tend to be
more predictable in social situations such as eye contact and seating arrangement in a room
where elements of communicating social warmth or discomfort are prevalent (Greenwald,
Krieger, 2006).
The IAT demonstration outlined in this paper is the able-disable bodied IAT. Implicit
associations in the abled-disabled category are important because society is full of people who
are labeled as “disabled” in one sense or another. The term disabled covers a wide variety of
people because you can be physically disabled, mentally disabled, or both. Amputees in today’s
society have the option to have prosthetic limbs made so they can fit in with society.
It is
important to know the true nature of society’s feelings towards this particular group. I believe
that the disabled IAT will not be unlike the results for the preference of white people over black
people. People that have a disability may have an explicit attitude that they prefer disabled
people over abled people but their implicit attitudes will tell them otherwise.
Past experiments have shown us most people will express an automatic preference
towards able bodied people because physical disabilities tend to induce fear in individuals in
some cases leading to negative attitudes and associations (Myers et al. 2009). In the young
versus old demonstration conducted by Nosek et al. (2002) there were also differences between
the implicit and explicit attitudes towards each category. Their implicit attitudes stayed relatively
the same for all age groups in that everyone preferred younger people. Though their explicit
Implicit association
attitudes changed as the participants ages got older. Each explicit attitude changed to conform to
their specific age group saying that the older people preferred older people as well. This has a
positive relationship with the black versus white questionnaire (Nosek et al., 2002). I believe
that similar results will be obtained regarding implicit and explicit attitudes on abled-disabled
people.
Method
Participants
The participants in this research were self-selected and Greenwald states that the “results
cannot be treated as any representative of any definable population.” Though they are not able to
be categorized into one group 38,554 IAT results were collected from June 2003 to May 2006
making for a diverse population (Nosek et al., 2002)
Apparatus
The apparatus that was used was an online test from project implicit. To access the site
you simply go to the Project implicit website which is “https://implicit.harvard.edu.” When you
get to the website in the top left corner there is a button that says “take demo test”, click that
button and choose the disability IAT that is near the bottom. While you are completing the test
you will notice that the background is black and the words “good” and “bad” are contrasted in
green in the left and right corners of the screen. There were two different stimuli used in the
experiment the first were photos and the second was a list of words that entailed a meaning a
good or bad. The pictures on the test included crutches, a crosswalk sign, a skier, a school area
sign, kids playing sign, handicapped sign, a blind person sign, and seeing-eye dog sign. The
words that were shown in the middle of the screen in green letters were joy, love, peace,
wonderful, pleasure, excellent, evil, angry, terrible, rotten, nasty, and bomb. The pictures were
Implicit association
colored in white with the terms able bodied and disabled also scripted in white lettering while the
rest of the words remained green all in contrast of a black background.
Procedure
After the process of getting onto the site and selecting the correct IAT test, in this case the
disability test, you fill out the requested information and follow the instructions. It will soon
bring you to a page where they tell you to press “E” to associate pictures with able- bodied
people and “I” to associate the picture with disabled people. The idea is to complete this as fast
as you can. The next part of the test is to relate the words that are mentioned previously into the
corners. These words are projected into the middle of the screen and you click the button “E” or
“I” again to label them as generally good or bad. This process is also supposed to be completed
with speed. The next section is a combination of the first two tests. The words disabled person
and good is in the left hand corner and the words able person and bad in the right, pictures and
words are then presented in the middle of the screen and you place them as quickly as possible in
the right categories. Then they make you repeat the very first test matching pictures with able or
disabled. Finally the words are reversed and disabled goes with bad while able goes with good
and you place each photo or word in the correct category with speed. Speed was the dependant
variable that ultimately decided their implicit attitudes.
Results
What was found in the three years that the web sited collected the results for the disability
IAT test was: Thirty-three percent have a strong automatic preference for abled people compared
to disabled people; twenty-seven percent have a moderate automatic preference toward abled
people compared to disabled people; sixteen percent have a slight automatic preference towards
Implicit association
able-bodied people compared to disabled; fifteen percent have little to no automatic preference
toward abled people; five percent have a slight automatic preference towards disabled people;
three percent have a moderate automatic preference towards disabled people and one percent of
the tested population had a strong automatic preference for disabled people compared to abled
people.
Discussion
The earlier prediction that people would have a strong preference toward able bodied
people has been demonstrated through the results of this IAT as well as comparisons to similar
Implicit Association Tests. The results of the test were relatively close to the prediction provided
though unlike the white versus black IAT test there was no actual recording in the final results if
the people taking the test were abled or disabled. This lead to a problem with reading disabled
person’s implicit views. Fortunately, I was born missing my left elbow and can attest that my
implicit attitudes were in fact different from my explicit attitudes. One reason the IAT’s resulted
with similar information is that both black people and disabled people are minorities and being
minorities, the way they think about their particular group is similar. Everyone wants to conform
and be normal as in the age preference case conducted by (Nosek et al., 2002). Older people said
they preferred older people when implicitly they really preferred younger people. Fear of the
unknown plays a huge role in molding our implicit attitudes when we are young. The
environment we grow up in and the people we know shape and mold how we view the society
around us (Myers et al., 2009). In most cases even if you are disabled, black or even elderly (in
Canada) you are still surrounded by people of the majority which has a huge impact on your
perception. It is wrong that we hold these perceptions intrinsically about disabled people. It isn’t
hard to see based on the results why things such as prosthetic limbs were invented. Some may be
Implicit association
for practical use like the leg, but many are made for the sole purpose of making the person fit
into society. We unintentionally force people to alter their appearance to be socially accepted.
Some of the general shortcomings are that it is a self-interested test. It is a random sample that
takes it and making it hard to define a population. Also, people are permitted to take the test as
many times as they want which may have an effect on the numbers because then implicit
thoughts are becoming explicit and there is room to change answers and redesign your selfimage. One way to make this test more realistic is to find a better way to relate the pictures and
words to each other. At the beginning of the test it seemed like more bad and disabled things
were supposed to go on the right which created a pattern. Sometimes I felt myself falling into
this pattern and was wondering if this could have potentially skewed the end result. Overall the
implicit attitudes of society are really an eye-opener to the room for improvement that is in all of
us. Implicit prejudices can be changed, but forming new norms through work and practice are
necessary for this to happen.
Implicit association
Works cited
Nosek, B. A., Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (2002). Harvesting implicit group attitudes and
beliefs from a demonstration web site. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice,
6, 101-115. doi: 10.1037//1089-2699.6.1.101
Greenwald, A. G., & Krieger, L. H. (2006). Implicit bias: Scientific foundations. California Law
Review, 94, 945-967.
Myers, D. G., Spencer, S. J., & Jordan, C. (2009). Social Psychology 4th edition, Canadian.
Toronto: McGraw-Hill.