Question

Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Young people over Old people.

The sorting test you just took is called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). You categorized good and bad words with images of Old people and Young people.

Disclaimer:The results are not a definitive assessment of your implicit preference. The results may be influenced by variables related to the test (e.g., the category labels or particular items used to represent the categories on the IAT) or the person (e.g., how tired you are). The results are provided for educational purposes only.

How Does The IAT Work?

The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts (e.g., Old people and Young people) and evaluations (e.g., good, bad). The main idea is that making a response is easier when closely related items share the same response key. We would say that one has an implicit preference for Young people relative to Old people if they are faster to categorize words when Young people and Good share a response key relative to when Old people and Good share a response key.

Why Should I Care About My IAT Score?

Implicit preferences can predict behavior. Implicit preferences are related to discrimination in hiring and promotion, medical treatment, and decisions related to criminal justice.

What Can I Do About an Implicit Preference That I Do Not Want?

Right now, there is not enough research to say for sure that implicit biases can be reduced, let alone eliminated. Packaged "diversity trainings" generally do not use evidence-based methods of reducing implicit biases. Therefore, we encourage people to instead focus on strategies that deny implicit biases the chance to operate, such as blind auditions and well-designed "structured" decision processes.

Other People's Results

The summary of other people's results shows that most people implicitly prefer Young people to Old people - i.e., they are faster sorting when good words and images of Young people share the same key. Notably, more than 40% of the people included in this graph report having no preference between the two age categories. Summarize results and Reflect on the topic of racism, heuristics, and what you know about cognition and influences that go into formation of thoughts.

Answer 1

Humans have a tendency to relate with people who belong to their own category, which can be either their caste, religion, likes/ dislikes, anything. Their association becomes a bit more stronger when this is the case. Young people mostly tends to identify themselves more with younger people as compared to the older people, when they have certain good cues to relate to. Every individual forms certain mental concepts or sets which are also known as heuristics which generally helps them to identify and categorize them accordingly. This categorization is a part of heuristics. Heuristics also give rise to concepts like racism which becomes a platform for people's discrimination.

This is also reflected in the individuals' thought processes and their behaviors. Their concepts and categorizations do influence their thinking about people and their behavior towards them. For example: When a person finds someone of his own age who has certain similarities like age, religion, etc, tend to relate more with each other as compared to others also they behave in a very friendly manner with them even wen they meet for the first time.