The Effect of Implicit Attitudes on Racial Categorization
Access Type
Open Access
Entry Number
58
Start Date
4-5-2017 12:00 PM
End Date
4-5-2017 1:00 PM
Department
Psychology
Abstract
Racial categorization is defined as how an individual would be placed in different groups based on the color of their skin, compared to other physical traits like hair, or gender. Multiracial individuals are historically categorized by their minority race. This research explores college student’s implicit attitudes and their racial categorizations of multiracial individuals. Gelman, Ho and Roberts (2015) studied essentialism (assigning attributes for a whole entity) and how racial bias contributes to the categorization of multiracial individuals. Regarding race, racial essentialism tends to mean that someone thinks more closed-mindedly in terms of what makes a person belong to a certain race. Racial categorization and biases related to categorization have been both implicit and explicit in society. One way to test implicit attitudes is through a test called the IAT, which stands for the Implicit Attitude Test (Banaji, Greenwald, & Nosek, 1998). It uses reaction time to determine the strength of associations between concepts such as Black people, or Asian- Americans, and stereotypes about those concepts. The goal of this current study is to create a hybrid test combining the Race and Asian IAT using E-prime, because there is no current multiracial IAT test. In this study the aim is to examine why people exhibit biases in the categorization of multiracial individuals. E-prime will calculate the latency in response time from the time the image is shown to participants and them pressing the correct key on the computer. We predict that latencies will demonstrate that participants categorize by the minority race.
Faculty Mentor(s)
Bianca Sumutka
The Effect of Implicit Attitudes on Racial Categorization
Racial categorization is defined as how an individual would be placed in different groups based on the color of their skin, compared to other physical traits like hair, or gender. Multiracial individuals are historically categorized by their minority race. This research explores college student’s implicit attitudes and their racial categorizations of multiracial individuals. Gelman, Ho and Roberts (2015) studied essentialism (assigning attributes for a whole entity) and how racial bias contributes to the categorization of multiracial individuals. Regarding race, racial essentialism tends to mean that someone thinks more closed-mindedly in terms of what makes a person belong to a certain race. Racial categorization and biases related to categorization have been both implicit and explicit in society. One way to test implicit attitudes is through a test called the IAT, which stands for the Implicit Attitude Test (Banaji, Greenwald, & Nosek, 1998). It uses reaction time to determine the strength of associations between concepts such as Black people, or Asian- Americans, and stereotypes about those concepts. The goal of this current study is to create a hybrid test combining the Race and Asian IAT using E-prime, because there is no current multiracial IAT test. In this study the aim is to examine why people exhibit biases in the categorization of multiracial individuals. E-prime will calculate the latency in response time from the time the image is shown to participants and them pressing the correct key on the computer. We predict that latencies will demonstrate that participants categorize by the minority race.