Lecture 5: Implicit & Explicit Prejudice Flashcards
1
Q
attitudes (1)
A
- Evaluations (with some degree of favour or disfavour) of an object or target.
2
Q
implicit attitudes (2)
A
- Outside of awareness, unintentionally activated, uncontrollable, but efficient for processing.
- Develop through repeated pairings of the object (e.g. “ethnic minorities”) and evaluation (e.g. “bad”).
3
Q
How can we form implicit attitudes? (3)
A
- Passively; by oservation, media, etc.
- Experience
- By associating constructs; repeated pairings of objects and evaluations, which can happen actively or passively.
4
Q
explicit attitudes (3)
A
- A propositional process, where people consciously appraise various relevant statements and form an evaluation of a target.
- Gawronski & Bodenhausen (2006): Multiple propositions (inputs) form your attitude; one of the inputs is often the implicit attitudes, others often vary (people you’re with, cultural norms, target group, etc.).
- If affective reaction is consistent with other propositions, implicit and explicit attitudes will be similar.
5
Q
measuring implicit attitudes (6)
A
- Want to measure attitudes without asking participants for them.
- Word Fragment Completion Tasks
- Lexical Decision Tasks
- Implicit Association Tasks
- Pros: avoids social desirability effects and relatively easy to administer.
- Cons: literacy skills may influence responses; measuring prejudice or knowledge of stereotypes?
6
Q
measuring explicit attitudes (6)
A
- Asking people what they think/feel; often use questionnaires about peoples’ attitudes on Likert scales.
- Modern Sexism Scale
- Modern Homo-negativity Scale
- Modern Racism Scale
- Pros: cheap and even easier to administer than implicit tasks.
- Cons: possibility of social desirability and demand effects (i.e. trying to guess what the experimenter’s measuring and manipulating your responses).
7
Q
Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams (1995) (6)
(hint: reactivity of MRS)
A
- Demonstrated the reactivity of the Modern Racism Scale (MRS).
- Contacted white participants with high scores on MRS based on mass testing from a larger opinion survey.
- Invited into lab to complete the MRS again and either had a White or Black experimenter.
- Was told that the experimenter would be personally entering their responses into a computer; i.e. participants had impression that experimenter would see their results.
- When they had a Black experimenter, their scores on the MRS went way down; scores even lowered a bit with the White experimenter, demonstrating social desirability effects.
- Evidence for reactivity, i.e. reacting to the MRS differently depending on the context people are being assessed in.
8
Q
To what extent are implicit and explicit attitudes related? (5)
A
-
Hoffman et al. (2005): Found that there wasn’t a huge correlation (r = 0.24).
- The correlation is lower than average when: 1) it’s a socially sensitive topic and 2) when cognitive elaboration (if people can think about it more) is high.
- People relied less on their gut feelings when social desirability and cognitive elaboration are high; i.e. people can’t control their implicit attitudes, but if the situation calls for it will manipulate explicit attitudes, causing the two to diverge.
-
Fazio et al. (1990): Found high correlations between implicit and explicit for non-socially sensitive attitudes (e.g. snakes, dentists), r = 0.63.
- Weak and negative correlations between implicit and explicit for socially sensitive attitudes (e.g. pornography, racial attitudes), r = -0.11.
9
Q
relationship between attitudes and behaviour (5)
A
- Some behavioural measures that have been used to assess predictive validity of implicit measures might reflect something other than negativity (e.g. anxiety)
- Unambiguously harmful behaviours rarely studied (since it’s difficult to get people to harm others, or to get it past an ethics board).
- Implicit and explicit attitudes don’t always show the same pattern—people can be high on one but low on the other.
- What does each predict?
- How do the two combine to predict behaviour?
10
Q
Dovidio et al. (2002) (5)
(hint: implicit attitudes & behaviour)
A
- How do implicit and explicit prejudice relate to behaviour in intergroup interactions?
- White particpants had their explicit (attitudes towards Blacks scale, pre-test) and implicit (subliminal priming with Black and White faces with positive/negative traits) attitudes measured.
- Interacted with two confederates, one White one Black; had a race neutral conversation.
- Third party raters coded interaction on participants’ verbal friendliness and non-verbal friendliness (couldn’t see who participants were interacting with).
- Verbal behaviour was highly correlated with participants’ explicit attitudes, whereas their nonverbal behaviours were highly correlated with their implicit attitudes.
11
Q
Penner et al. (2010) (8)
(hint: healthcare & aversive racism)
A
- Investigated the relationship between physician explicit and implicit biases play in shaping physician and patient reactions in racially discordant medical interactions.
- Black patients and physicians of different ethnicites were recruited.
- Physicians completed a 25-item explicit measure of racial prejudice and an IAT (implicit prejudice) several weeks before the medical interaction.
- After the interaction, physicians and patients completed items that assessed feelings of being on the same team.
- Patients rated physician warmth and friendliness, their patient satisfaction, and satisfaction with the interaction.
- Greater explicit prejudice of physicians predicted less involving of patients in decision making, greater implicit bias predicted lower team ratings.
- Patients rated aversive racists (low explicit, high implicit) more negatively than physicians low in both explicit and implicit bias.
- Demonstrates that implicit bias influences a particular individual’s actions as well as impacts those they’re being interacted with.
12
Q
Rudman et al. (2007) (12)
(hint: discrimination & IAT)
A
- Argue that implicit stereotypes are more predictive of overtly harmful actions than implicit attitudes when it comes to intergroup relations.
- Study 1: Participants of different ethnicities completed an attitude IAT (sunshine/death, fortune/slime) and stereotype IAT (dangerous/ethical, lazy/successful), feeling thermometer, and the MRS.
- Were also asked to report how often, over the course of their life, they’d engaged in specific verbal discrimination acts, avoiding/exlucding others, and other nonverbal and physically hurtful acts.
- Attitude IAT correlated with verbal discrimination; stereotype IAT related to all 3 behavioural indexes.
- People who hold negative attitues are more likely to verbally discriminate, but holding negative stereotypes predict all kinds of discriminatory behaviour.
- Study 2: Completed stereotype IAT for negative Jewish attributes and positive Christian attributes, negative Asian attributes and positive White attributes & same attitude IAT from study 1, and same two IATs from Study 1 for Blacks vs. Whites.
- Also completed a thermometer and explicit measures of prejudice, as well as cultural stereotype index (perceived tendency for society to view majority group members more positively than minority group members).
- The IAT was unrelated to the cultural stereotype index for each ethnicity, but IAT and thermometer were positively correlated.
- People who associated minority group members with negative attributes and majority group members with positive attributes were likely to recommend budget cuts for the target minority group’s student organization.
- Both the stereotype and attitude IAT predicted economic discrimination.
- Demonstrates how the IAT does measure personal attitudes; although members of minority and majority groups scored differently on the cultural stereotypes index, this didn’t affect their IAT scores.
- This doesn’t mean that culture isn’t important in influencing stereotypes, but implicit attitudes aren’t merely a reflection of cultural attitudes but also of discriminatory behaviour.
