Five

Five

People tend to think of themselves more tolerate and open minded about their racial attitudes. However, a lot of the studies show that people’s hidden attitudes or implicit attitudes towards other races do not always match their explicit attitudes. Implicit attitudes can be tested by Implicit Attitude Tests or IAT.
In 2001, McConnell & Leibold conducted an experiment to show that IAT scores relates to people’s explicit behaviors. Their participants were 42 White undergraduates from Michigan State University and they were asked to complete a survey on African Americans to measure the explicit attitude. Then they were asked to complete a word-based IAT to measure the implicit attitude. The results showed that the participants with IAT scores that indicate they have negative attitudes against African Americans also had more negative interaction with African Americans. Dovido, Kawakai, & Gaerner (2002) did a study on a relationship between participants’ implicit attitude and explicit attitude. In their experiment, they had 15 male and 25 female White Northeaster liberal arts college undergraduates as participants and they were asked to fill out the Brigham’s (1993) survey on attitudes toward African Americans. The results showed that the most participants reported that they were more tolerable when it comes to interacting with African Americans than their later behaviors showed. This showed that peoples’ implicit and explicit attitude is not consistent. Plant & Peruche (2004) conducted an experiment on a real life problem.   Their participants were 50 police officers and were asked to do a computer simulation on making decisions to shoot African American and White criminal suspects. The results showed that the participants were more likely to shoot African American criminal suspects than White suspects. However they also showed that with intensive training, the participants were able to neutralize the biases. To see if the IAT is actually...