Implicit Association Test

Everyday people are influenced by others to think, feel, and act in certain ways. It is human nature to want to feel a part of a group, and important. Due to this, people tend to conform to ideas and concepts they would not normally have. The feeling of acceptance of a certain group can easily influence a person to change their entire viewpoints, consciously or unconsciously. These unconscious conformities can lead to attitudes and biases of an outgroup; these biases can be tested by Implicit Association Tests.
For centuries, humans banded together to form groups to survive. The members of each group feel a close connection to the group they belong to and the other members in their group. When people are in a particular group they tend to
Explicit attitudes are attitudes that a person can report. Implicit attitudes are attitudes that influence a person’s feelings and behavior at an unconscious level. Implicit attitudes can contribute to bias associations of outgroups. To test these biases researchers use a reaction time test called an Implicit Association Test. This measures how quickly a person associates concepts or objects with positive or negative words. Implicit Association Tests are better predictor of behaviors than explicit self-reports because it is coming from your unconscious roots, rather what you want people to think you believe (Gazzaniga, Heatherton, &
Being a woman, there are a lot of biases and strong opinions if woman are capable to be in the field of work. Given that it is 2016, with equal rights and equal pay, these biases should not be happening. Many employers will deny it, and their explicit attitude towards the situation will be “I have no problems hiring a women.” But, subconsciously they may be rooting for their group, the male group, to win, giving the position to the male instead of the female. In my day-to-day life racism still happens. This is part of explicit and implicit attitudes. This could be due to how you were brought up, if your family is racist, etc. Just like the Implicit Asscociation Test results, 23% of people have a strong automatic association of Blacks with weapons and Whiles with harmless objects, 30% have moderate automatic association, and 19% have slights automatic association. Only 1% of people tested as strong automatic association of Whites with weapons and Blacks with harmless object. Why is this? Because racism still exists. People stereotype, and groups all African Americans together as dangerous and bad because of one story they hear on the news. Our grandparents and great grandparents grew up only knowing racism, and they passed it down to their children and grand children. It is a vicious cycle that needs to stop. Unconscious bias judgments happen everyday. Some people try to force themselves to believe one thing on the outside,