My result for the Native American IAT was a slight association with Native Americans and American. I definitely felt the association test was harder when sorting Native Americans with foreign places. It was very easy for me to associate them with American lands, and difficult for me to group them with foreign lands, which I think is the reason for my result. I like my result, and I would rather err on the side that was my result. However, I can't help but to think that this was due to word association rather than concepts. "American" is both in Native American and how I was classifying landscapes, so it was a faster connection.
My result for the skin tone test revealed that I have a slight automatic preference for light-skinned people. I knew when I was sorting that this would be the result, since I took longer to sort positive words with darker skin tones in the second half. It was easier for me to associate "happy", "smiling", etc with light-skinned people than dark-skinned. I don't quite know why. I know that I tend to think of positive words with lighter colors, such as yellow for happiness, and negative words with dark or non-vibrant colors. So, I wonder if this affected my results? Maybe, maybe not.
I'm trying to be more aware of how I am prepping my mind before jumping into a sorting session...
Also, the order in which I am making these associations might matter, so I'm logging those as well.
Asian IAT. First, sorting European American and foreign, along with Asian American and American.
I'm making the mental association between A's. I feel like this was quite easy and could even stop paying attention to my pre-association. Now, it's flipped. I'm making the association between white people and American. This was a bit more difficult. If the foreign pictures in the test were of places in Asia, I suspect I might have had a slight bias with grouping them with Asian landmarks rather than landmarks in the US. Ok, so once again I have a slight bias after making my first mental association in the test. The first grouping was the one in which I had a bias. The second was more difficult. This also happened for the skin-tone and the Native American IAT.
Finally, the Race IAT. The first grouping is white people with bad. My prediction is that I will have a slight negative association with white people, based on the order of the test.
I'm finding that I'm using the mental tool of visualizing happy black people and angry white people. But the question is, will it be easier for me to visualize it the other way around? I didn't have to pay as much attention, but my speed was probably the same. My result is that I have an automatic preference for black people over white people, which matches my prediction. The first pair I grouped was the one I had a preference for according to the test. It is possible that this is a true reflection of my bias, but I think it is more likely due to the ordering, since this is has happened 4/4 times. But, this does not mean that the overall results are reflecting order, since half of the participants have it in one order and half take it with the reverse order. It is acknowledged on the results page that order effects do occur.
