Format
Step 1:
The first part of the assignment requires you to take the Implicit Association Task through the
Online Psychology Laboratory. You Class ID for this test is 11162. At the end of this test you
can view your own results and download the results of others who have taken this test.
Take the IAT (RACE) Your Class ID for taking this test is 11162. Your results are for
discussion with your class tutor. http://opl.apa.org/Experiments/Start.aspx?EID=5
Step 2:
You have been provided with a data set of results from this experiment and are required to
produce a scientific report which analyses those results. Sections should follow the scientific
report format:
(i) Abstract
(ii) Literature review: Drawing on pertinent literature in the area you are required to
build a literature review that provides a rationale for this study. Attitudes,
evaluative judgments, are an important focus of social psychology coverage in
most introductory textbooks. Frequently, attitudes are examined in an ABC
framework, involving affective, behavioral, and cognitive correlates and
consequences. Insofar as the attitude of prejudice, an evaluative judgment of a
person or object based solely on group membership, the affective manifestation of
negative affect might include hostility, anxiety, or even fear. The cognitive
correlate might be a negative stereotype, with people believing that the
stigmatized group is lazy, aggressive, or unmotivated. The behavioural
manifestation might involve a predisposition to discriminate against, or behave
negatively toward, the stigmatized group.
(iii) Hypothesis: Formulate a hypothesis or set of hypotheses to test.
(iv) Methodology: You are provided with the basics of the procedure below, but for
your report you are required to complete all the sections that you would normally
find in such a report, including participant demographics, numbers, study, design,
dependent and independent variables and procedure etc. You can presume that
as this is a study which resonates from the American Psychological Association
(APA) Online Lab, that ethical permission was granted by the APA.
(v) Results: Execute a series of tests that permit you to answer your research
question, including descriptive statistics, underlying assumptions of this data,
graphs and the appropriate inferential test that will permit the testing of differences
between groups.
(vi) Discussion, limitations and conclusions.
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(vii) Referencing: All reports should contain complete and correct citations for every
source in American Psychological Association (APA) style
Implicit Association Test (Race)
Procedure
Participants complete two types of tasks. Each task requires participants to categorize words or
pictures. A single keystroke (either 1 or 2) is used to make face categorizations and word
categorizations. The first type of task requires correct racial classification of a person in a
photograph, as shown in Figure 1. Similarly, participants classify words on the basis of ‘good’
or ‘bad’ as shown in Figure 2.
The second task requires each participant to classify a photo or stimulus using a combined set of
terms (e.g., is the person in the photograph African American or is the connotation of the
adjective Good; is the person in the photograph European American or is the connotation of the
adjective Bad). For example, if a photo of an African American is presented as a stimulus, the
participant must decide whether to indicate this photo as African American/Good or European
American/Bad. An example of this task is presented Figure 3.
The demonstration contains five blocks of trials, summarized in the table below.
Block Task Stimulus Key Stimulus Key # of trials
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1 Initial target
concept
discrimination
African-American
face
Left European
American face
Right 10
2 Associated
attribute
discrimination
Bad words (e.g.
“agony”)
Left Good words
(e.g. “joy”)
Right 10
3 Initial
combined task
(Stereotypecongruent)
African-American
or bad words
Left EuropeanAmerican of
good words
Right
4 Reversed
target concept
discrimination
EuropeanAmerican face
Left AfricanAmerican face
Right
5 Reversed
combined task
(Stereotype
noncongruent)
EuropeanAmerican face or
bad words
Left AfricanAmerican face
or good words
Right
For analysis, the key blocks of interest are the two combined tasks (Blocks 3 and 5). The IAT is
scored by calculating the difference in average reaction time for Block 3 (the stereotype
congruent condition) and the average reaction time for Block 5 (the stereotype non-congruent
condition). A positive score is interpreting as suggesting an automatic association between
African-Americans and negative terms, or as a preference for European-Americans. At the end
of the demonstration, students are shown their IAT score and given the opportunity to save their
data.
Analysis
Data collected from IAT is shown below:
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The first column provides the participant ID number, or the number that each person receives
upon completion of the experiment. Data in columns 2 and 3 are relatively self-explanatory:
gender and age.
The column labelled preference is an indication of how the person reported their feelings
about individuals on the basis of race. If the participant declined to indicate his or her warmth
toward a particular group, you will see the word “Decline” in the column next to the
participant’s information.
The possible values represent the following conditions:
1 – I strongly prefer Whites to Blacks
2 – I moderately prefer Whites to Blacks
3 – I like Whites and Blacks equally
4 – I moderately prefer Blacks to Whites
5 – I strongly prefer Blacks to Whites
In the column labelled warmth, participants reported how warmly they feel toward each group.
The ratings range from 0 (coldest) to 10 (warmest). The Warmth number is the difference
between the two ratings made on the Black and White scales. If the difference score is
positive it means the Warmth score was greater for Whites than Blacks.
Negative scores imply more warmth toward Blacks and scores of 0 indicate equal warmth
toward both races. Finally, data are in columns labelled congruent and incongruent. Data in
these columns reflect the average time in seconds (averaged across trials) it takes to complete
the task. Faster times reflect implicitly held attitudes because the response times are believed
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to reflect strength of association in semantic memory. It is expected that times will be faster for
the stereotype congruent condition, suggesting the presence of an automatic association.
Controls: The IAT randomly selects the ordering of the combined tasks to reduce the influence of
order effects on aggregate scores for groups of participants.