How Implicit Attitudes Reinforce Discrimination
Joby Mae Jimenez
Truckee Meadows Community College
PSY/SOC 261 Social Psychology
Professor Joseph Tucker
October 4, 2020
How Implicit Attitudes Reinforce Discrimination
Implicit attitudes entail people’s evaluations of things or people without conscious awareness. It describes the memory that triggers a specific behavior that can influence one to have favorable or unfavorable evaluation. Implicit attitudes tend to reinforce a sense of discrimination by people against an object or a person. Unconscious thoughts tend to enhance implicit prejudice or negative feelings and beliefs people hold about a particular subject. Notably, a person is likely to depict a discriminatory behavior against a condition without being aware of its consequences. The Implicit attitudes enhance implicit biases, which make an individual demonstrate stereotypical evaluations of a given subject.
According to Karpinski & Hilton (2001), implicit racial attitudes have enhanced the culture of discrimination in American culture and reveals prejudice’s unpleasant truth. In my implicit association test on weight, it is clear that I have a weird belief and attitudes towards people with obese or overweight. I have an unknown bias against fat people over thin people based on my unconscious distinguishing and judgment of these groups of people. Besides, the strong implicit bias favoring thin people demonstrate a significant factor that may trigger a series of discrimination and bad behavior against obese individuals.
Furthermore, implicit attitudes promote comparative bias and judgment in the decision-making process. The bias towards a subject demonstrates deep-rooted prejudice within a person (Karpinski & Hilton, 2001). For example, my assessment of weight reveals a comparative bias against obesity condition. My strong implicit negative attitude towards high-fat foods and failure by fat people to control their eating habits amounts to discrimination. The anti-fat attitudes are likely to attract unnecessary actions and predisposition to overweight people without my conscious mind. Conclusively, implicit attitudes perpetuate discrimination by a person against an object or group of people and strengthen bad behaviors and actions.
Gender IAT is a test primarily used to measure the spontaneous reactions that occur through timed task categorization. This case involves sorting words into similar groups within the shortest time possible. According to Dasgupta and Asgari (2004), the Implicit Association Test, particularly on gender, is a study primarily considered in the event of promoting bias literacy. Thus, it is referred to as an advancement of science—the gender IAT of an individual score depends on the responses obtained from the five demographics items with anonymity. However, observations can be used to make the research viable. These data are not linked to an individual but aggregated. For the case of the non-research option, the respondent does not give responses to demographic items. In this case, the displayed results remain individual information; therefore, they cannot be used or saved for any research reads linked vote preference and IAT scores. However, the results could not be verified since the narrative holds that IAT reports help in understanding election results. In this case, Balik interprets the scenario as a strike where over 80% of Trump supporters showed bias in creating a linkage between men and women in terms of career. However, 74% of the respondents who support Clinton besides the other 50% men who supported either candidate did not show a sign of biasness. In accordance with the HCD research, the participants partially exhibited gender stereotype association with regard to their favorite candidate. To justify the assumption, it is prudent to acknowledge that the staff involved were impartial, thus creating no significant difference in all parties. However, women hold low levels of gender bias, while men do not exhibit it at all. With regard to the Clintons case
, there was no gender bias in both men and women. However, in Trumps’ case, women showed low levels of gender bias.
In conclusion, The HCD experiment of election results in the United States through the investigation exhibited low gender bias levels against women.
Reference
Karpinski, A., & Hilton, J. L. (2001). Attitudes and the implicit association test. Journal of personality and social psychology, 81(5), 774.