Loyola Marymount University
Follow this link to the guest portal for the IAT. Pick one test and complete the exercise in class. In a reply to this post, describe your experience and whether you learned anything new about yourself. If you are comfortable sharing your results, please include this in your response.
Please choose a different test and compose a second response no later than midnight Wednesday, February 5.
Before class on Thursday, February 6, respond to the class member who responded immediately before you.
I didn’t learn anything about myself even though the test gave me a result that I wasn’t expecting as I am simply confident in my preferences in that category. I find it interesting why the test didn’t work for me though, what caused the error, was I just bad at fast matching or does this test not accurately know how to test the way that some people think of others.
I don’t think I learned anything new about myself by completing the test. I think I kind of knew the results before they came back for the one I took.
I took the test about age.
The task had me sort images into “old” or “young” categories, as well as “good” or “bad” categories, displaying pictures of faces and words like “detest” for the latter category.
Eventually, a later task had me sort these categories simultaneously, also switching the pairs from “young/good and old/bad” to “young/bad and old/good”. This was tricky to do because I already had muscle memory built from the previous trials, causing me to false report sometimes.
My responses suggested that I have a strong automatic preference for young people compared to old people.
I don’t think I learned anything about myself, but as someone who interns at a psychology lab, I enjoy seeing other scientists’ studies and how they operate.
I took the Weight IAT test and I don’t know how I feel about my results. I had difficulty taking this test because the associations it was asking me for were not the associations I was making in my head. With that, my results seemed accurate, but I also do not know if they were fully accurate due to me clicking the wrong keys subconsciously.
I took the age test and I think it doesn’t surprise me that I have a strong automatic preference for younger people over old because I am around younger people more often. I think at the end I just started getting more annoyed by the length of the quiz, but I think the results were correct for the most part, although I do not think I dislike older people. I think its just gravitating to what I know best and who I am around more.
That does make sense, that because you are primarily around younger people you would have a preference for them. I completely get being annoyed at the length of the quiz; I felt the same way about mine! Gravitating towards what we are familiar with is what’s the most natural for us and there’s not really any changing or avoiding that.
I took the gender and liberal arts/science IAT and it hurt my brain a bit. Tying to remember which category was associated with which key was difficult for me for some reason today and definitely impacted my results. I don’t know how much of my results were from actually having an association with one or the other or from me just messing up the keys, so I am a bit skeptical of the results. I did like taking the test overall and found it very interesting as a concept as well.
I completed the Gender and Career IAT, and I am surprised by my results. I scored that I have a slight automatic association for Male with Family and Female with Career. This is odd to me because usually the roles are reversed. I do like my results though because I feel women should be seen as a career as well as men. I also feel that men should be associated with family rather than just women. I didn’t think I thought this strongly about it, but I guess my results are saying differently.
Your results are so interesting I love it! I would also think that my brain would automatically connect Male with Career and Women with Family, but I absolutely agree that the opposite is so empowering. I’d be interested in seeing what my results would be for this test!
I completed the Old versus Young IAT, and my results were strong automatic preference for young people over old people. I was easily able to associate Old with Bad, and Young with Good. But when the options were switched to Old with Good and Young with Bad, I struggled a bit more. I unconsciously wasn’t able to associate those categories together and selected each thing much slower. I learned that I have a strong preference for young people, whether I want to or not.
I took the Gener and Career test. My results showed that I had a strong automatic association with male with career and female with family. I feel like the test results were accurate to how I remember my childhood as I spent more time growing up with my mom and my dad was away working more. Now that I am older my dad is home a lot more and focuses on family, but growing up it was different.
Gender*
I took the Weight IAT (fat-thin). I think it was challenging at first to get a hold of pressing the right keys with the right trait. I found it more difficult to press the key for fat/positive and skinny/negative than I did for fat/negative and skinny/positive. I think this shows that I have a biased towards fat and skinny people and the way I perceive positive and negative words regarding them. It is not the best thing to do, but it is an instinct because of the culture we live in and the influence we have of media.
My results said that I have a slight automatic preference for thin people over fat people.
I took the Age IAT test, and my responses suggested that I have a slight automatic preference to old people than young people. I guess this surprised me. I think I would have guessed by score would have come out differently, but I did grow up seeing my grandparents everyday which I think could have an influence over this.
I took the Age Task test and it didn’t surprise me that I prefer young people to older people but what did surprise me was that I scored the same for moderate and Strong automatic preference for Young people compared to old people, the part that did trow me off was when they swapped the buttons meaning and I had to remember what went with what after just getting accustom to the first meaning but over all I think this is pretty accurate, and I am curious to know what would score on a different test.
I have not learned much about myself from this test because I already knew what the results would be. I feel like speed matching pictures and words to good or bad is not a good way to test someone’s preference. I found it difficult to remember which side was which while trying to go fast.
I completed the Sexuality IAT. It looks for underlying bias surrounding sexuality, and I was surprised by my results. I liked that they had a percentage comparison chart of over a million test-taker results at the end so you can see the bias over a large group of people. It was interesting to compare my results to the other population.
I took the Gender Science test which asked me to categorize male-associated words and female-associated words as well as words associated with liberal arts and science. My results were a little surprising, but after I saw them, I could see how my life experience could produce the outcome I saw. I was more likely to associate male and science together and women and liberal arts together.
I took the Gender with Career test. The test itself was a little difficult trying to remember which button went with which scenario. Other than that, it was pretty straightforward. My results showed little to no association between gender, career, and family. That did not shock me likely due to my family dynamic.
I also had issues with remembering which button went with what. For some reason, I think what determines the results is directly caused by those errors from your subconscious. I didn’t take this test, but I think that I would have similar results to you!
The second test I took was the IAT test on Age. This time, the correlations were easy for me to learn because I do not feel strongly a certain way one or the other. My results were not surprising on this note, because my results were that I do not prefer one or the other, which is what I initially thought.
I took the age test. I though it was interesting. The results told me that I preferred young people to older people. I’m kind of curious what determines this. I never thought I had a preference for anything age group.
I think this is cool. I think your results are the way they are is because you are young and more drawn to them rather than old people. That is my guess. I think I would have the same results as you if I took that test.
For my second test I took the Race IAT. I think I had a hard time correlating good/black and white/bad on the keys. That is really superficial of me. However, my results stated I was about equally fast at sorting ‘Black people’ with ‘Bad’ and ‘White people’ with ‘Good’ and at sorting ‘White people’ with ‘Bad’ and ‘Black people’ with ‘Good’. I thought I did not do as well, but my results said otherwise.
Similarly to my tests, it was hard to figure out which keys were which, especially if they ended up switching them, so I understand that part. It can be interesting to see what we think now can clash with the things we’ve been taught subconsciously.
For my second test, I took the religion test. I was not surprised by my results because I am a Christian, so I have firm belief’s regarding the topic. The results showed I prefer Christianity over Islam. This one was harder for me to take than my previous test however, because I do instinctively associate certain words with Christianity, but I do not necessarily associate bad words with the other religions that were shown.
I feel like that test was odd when you had to associate bad words with other religions. I think that your results were interesting, and I am wondering what my results would be as I am not very religious.
For my second test, I took the disability test. I was a little surprised that it says I have a moderate automatic preference for physically abled people over physically disabled people. I thought my results would come back as I prefer both, especially since I am on disability. I would say my results depend on what activity I am doing depending on what type of person I prefer. Granted as being on disability I probably would prefer someone who wasn’t also disabled as they could help me more than a disabled person probably could.
I guess thinking in the way of needed help, it would be beneficial to have someone who is in the opposite so you are able to be helped. The preference model on this was definitely confusing in how they can calculate that.
In this I took the gender/liberal arts and science and it says I have moderate association with male and science and liberal arts and female. I think since in society I want to as a women in the STEM fields see more association with women and science, but it is hard to when most media is seen with men and science. I think that has an influence over what my answers came to be, maybe some bias in that regard.
I also did this one and got similar results. I never really thought of this separation in fields before. I guess I categorize each gender in this way. My mother was always my English homework helper since she was a teacher and my dad works in the medical field, so it was what I was used to.
One of the tests I took was about sexuality. My score did not surprise me much. I enjoyed taking the test and was competitive about it even though I made a few mistakes. I’m not sure if it is truly accurate since it starts out with the negative words on one side and then switches it. My brain could have been used to the initial denotation.
I agree the test were fun to take even though I kept making mistakes. My test also switched one of the concepts and my brain could not seem to adjust so it makes me wonder how accurate the results were.
I also took the test on religion and my results again did not really surprise. I do feel like the test wants you to lose. It is interesting to see your unconscious biases displayed in a quiz. I hope that the data collected by the company can be used for a good cause.
For my second test I took was the age IAT, which compared old and young faces with good and bad words. My results came back that I prefer young people over old people. I do not think I have an actual preference for one of the other, so I feel like this test did not teach me anything new about myself. The test was fun to take, even though I kept messing up and it made me mad.
Second I took the old vs young test and it said that had a strong automatic preference for young people which makes sense.
I didn’t find any of my results from these studies to be particularly interesting either. They all seemed to “prove” the existence of the biases they wanted to show, but they also introduced the tests with those biases as the default way, causing muscle memory and past experiences to influence the later sections that flip the biases the other way around.
For my second test I took the Gender – Science test because I was curious on what point they were trying to make. They were looking at the association of peoples’ reactions for Male/Female connections to Science/Liberal Arts. In my results I tended to a moderate association for males with science and females for liberal arts, but that is also the order they gave by default. I have some concerns about the methodology of these tests, but they might be accounted for somewhere.
I’m also curious if this societal bias will soon be gone, with much more women going to college than men in general in recent years.
The second test I took actually surprised me a little bit, I wasn’t really expecting to get the results I got until I started taking it and was having a hard time with the implicit testing. I could tell what my results were going to be before I even got them honestly. Overall I think the tests just really show you what you do or don’t want to accept
I had the same feeling. I was surprised by my results. But I also thought as I was taking the test that I thought I could teel what my score was going to be after getting the answers wrong.
The second test I took surprised me a lot. I definitely had thought that my result said I was indifferent or had no preference, but it ended up saying that my responses suggested a strong automatic preference which I was not expecting. It was hard to get my head to adapt to clicking the right keys. But overall, this second test surprised me a ton.
My second test I took the Religion one. I thought it was kinda stupid, and not really all that meaningful. It felt more like a game than gathering actual data. I didn’t particularly learn anything.
For my second test, I took the religion Christianity versus Judaism IAT. My results were a strong automatic preference for Christianity over Judaism. As a Christian, these results did not surprise me at all. I subconsciously associated Christian-like words with positive words because I feel positively about my religion. I think it would have been more interesting to see the results from someone who isn’t religious or feels strongly about either option. The test would be able to uncover how they subconsciously think about those religions, without previous knowledge of preference. Since I am religious, it was easy to predict my results.
I did not grow up religious in any way, so I decided to take that test you took to see what I would get. Surprisingly I scored as a moderate automatic preference to Jewish people over Christian people. That was not something that I was predicting at all. I was expecting no automatic preference or slight for Christian people as I know more people who are Christian than Jewish.
The second test I took was the age IAT. My score was a strong automatic preference for young people over old people. That was what I was expecting too. I for some reason am not the biggest fan of older people, that sounds terrible, but it is true. For the test itself I messed up a lot on after they switched the categories and keys, which I do not know if that was from a bias I have or bad memory/hand eye coordination.