?Measuring Individual Difference in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test

Measuring Individual Difference in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test

Previous research indicates that there is a difference when associating genders and names to faces. The IAT was developed in order to measure implicit attitudes.
The experiments (three experiments were conducted) aim to evaluate the reliability of the IAT to measure implicit associations ("pleasant" and "unpleasant" associations were measured).
The researchers took Japanese Americans and Korean Americans and had them take the IAT.
IAT is most effective in determining ethnicity when subjects are highly immersed in their culture.
The third experiment was to further investigate implicit associations, which cannot be detected through explicit measures.
The three experiments all support the belief of the IAT's ability to detect automatic evaluative associations.

Strength: The result supported the IAT method in its ability to measure implicit associations. This means that these IAT is a useful tool to examine cognitive associative structures.

Weakness: It underscored independent ability. For example, past knowledge, or education background can influence the reaction time. The reaction time could be differed by gender. For example, males have faster reaction time for “weapons,” or “insects” while males are more familiar with these keywords.

Social animal Chapter 4

Human beings are not that rational as we might suppose. One example is the human cognition. Human cognition is conservative, which means that human beings usually put a lot of effort to maintain their thought and beliefs even some counterexamples occurs in the real world.
This chapter discusses many of these tendencies and in doing so it also discuss the value and the cost if theses thoughts.
Additionally, this chapter highlighted some topics about recovered memories and the current scientific beliefs about these types of memories
Lastly, this chapter shows how three commonly seen attributional biases – the fundamental attribution error, the actor-observer bias, and the self-biases –works even adequate evidence is lacking.
Strength: The author delivers his message very precise that make the reader easier to understand the concept. Plus he dives deep on human cognition to explain what other thing (for example bias) can influence human being’s cognition.

Weakness: This chapter doesn't weight much on contingent theory. Even human beings has the tendency to maintain their thoughts a beliefs, there is also a stron tendency to adjust with the environment. For example if 5 people in the room and 4 of them indicates A as a largest (what is not true in the reality-B is larger-) then there is a high tendency that the last person indicates A as a largest even she don't agree.

Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports On Mental Processes
Cognitive psychologists have proposed that people may have no direct access to higher order mental processes such as: judgment, problem solving, and initiation of behavior.
This view does not allow that people may sometimes be correct in their reports about higher order mental processes.
People may not interrogate a memory of cognitive responses, but report based on implicit, a priori theories about the causal connection between stimulus and response.
Strength: This paper helps us understand how the cognitive process works. In doing so the author gives some limitation of it.
Weakness: Telling the truth, I couldn't clearly understand the priori stimuli, and higher order cognitive process and how it works in forming cognition.

Seeing in believing: Exposure to countersterotypic women leaders…Gender stereotyping
This research consists of two studies that examine how people cognition (stereotyping) works after seeing a picture of highly praised women. It examines how human cognition forms.
The second study weight more on an interaction between human cognition and environment.
It turned out that some academic environment might have some influence in forming cognitive beliefs.
The findings underscore the power of local environment in shaping women’s non-conscious beliefs about the ingroup.
Strength: What I found interesting was that human cognition or implicit thinking (reaction) and the relationship between prior information. The additional study about was also promising, which controlled that target group and the environment by experimenting two different groups.
Weakness: Despite many positive contributions, this research doesn't examine a counter example (for example by seeing mans picture), which I think could be a good additional research.