Sexuality Implicit Association Test Assignment #2 PDF

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Summary

Taking the sexuality implicit association test and reporting my findings....

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Amanda Scheuer 373 Psychology of Women Professor Cahill 13 September 2017 Sexuality Implicit Association Test After reading about the Implicit Association Tests on the Harvard website, I took the Sexuality IAT because that was the one mentioned in class that interested me most. It involved the categories of gay and straight, and good and bad; I had to press the ‘E’ or ‘I’ keys when the given category appeared. For example, one round instructed me to press the letter ‘E’ when I saw symbols or words for “good” or “straight,” and to press the letter ‘I’ when I saw symbols or words for “bad” or “gay.” The next round was vice versa and that continued for a few rounds. The test also instructed me to move as quickly as possible in order to make the results more accurate. My results stated, “Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Gay people over Straight people,” which essentially means that I responded quicker to the associations of “good” and “gay” as opposed to “good” and “straight.” Although I was slightly skeptical about this test, I think my results were fairly accurate. I don’t think it’s because I am opposed to symbols of heterosexuality, obviously, but rather that I am very open-minded and accepting of symbols of homosexuality. The test asked if I am more liberal or more conservative, and I answered that I am moderately liberal, which I think is part of what ties in with my results of associating “good” with “gay,” and being slower to respond to the association of “good” and “straight.”

The test also asked about my sexuality and whether or not I have friends and family who are gay. Many of the people who are closest to me are in the LGBT community, and I am as well, so I assumed my results would reflect this. This clearly influenced my results because not only am I accepting of LGBT words and symbols, but this has a great impact on my own life which changes the way I associate these categories. My results were not surprising at all, although I honestly would have expected the results to be only a slight preference rather than a moderate one because I didn’t think I responded incorrectly or too slowly to some of the associations that represented straight people. I was surprised that the majority of respondents had a strong or moderate automatic preference for straight people compared to gay people. I did not expect such a significant discrepancy between the people who had a strong preference for straight people compared to gay people, (25%) versus those who had a strong preference for gay people compared to straight people (3%). Seeing that the distribution of the scores were from tests completed between 2004 and 2015 made me wonder if these results would be significantly different when compared to scores compiled in 2017. People have grown much more accepting over the years of the LGBT community, so I think the results would be different if the results were shown from 2016 to 2017. While I do not think that the strong preference for gay people would exceed that of straight people, I do believe the percentage of people who have any preference for gay people would surpass those who have no preference. I honestly found this IAT very strange, and I’m not sure that their claim of the IAT results potentially influencing behavior is particularly valid. Regardless, I was very interested to see the other respondents’ data as well as to see the way IATs work to reveal a little more about how people feel regarding certain topics without getting a biased response....