Implicit Association Test

Posted by Beetle B. on Sun 02 October 2016

Affective Priming: Flash words like sunshine or cancer to the screen. You need to judge whether the word is positive or negative. If you see a positive word and the next word is positive, you get the second word quickly. If the second word is of the opposite polarity, it takes extra long to accurately judge it.

Implicit Association Test works off of this principle. You show on the screen a person of a certain social group, as well as the word. Does it indicate biases towards a certain group? For most people, the answer is yes (usually to African Americans, immigrants, obese or elderly).

Juries are more likely to acquit attractive defendants and judges tend to give more lenient sentences to them.

Todorov Experiment

He showed people past candidate’s faces from without any identifying information. He asked which of them seemed more confident. Those candidates had won two thirds of the time. Note that the correlation was not so good when asked about attractiveness. The results were true even when shown the photo for 0.1s - not long enough to consciously analyze the photo.

tags : trm, morality, Haidt