Question

This question goes along with my test results for a psychology seminar. The results were the automatic preference of thin people over fat people.

The sorting test I just took is called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). You were asked categorized as good and bad words with images of Fat people and Thin people.

Disclaimer: The results are not a definitive assessment of your implicit preference. The results may be influenced by variables related to the test (e.g., the category labels or particular items used to represent the categories on the IAT) or the person (e.g., how tired you are). The results are provided for educational purposes only.

1. Although explicit and implicit attitudes are often the same, in many cases they are not (a person will have an implicit attitude or bias that does not match up with their stated explicit attitude). Where do explicit and implicit attitudes come from? Where does a person get their explicit attitudes (what influences their development)? Where do they get their implicit attitudes? Do they come from the same places? If so, why can they end up being different?

2. What bias, if any, did the test indicate that you had? Give your test results summary statement. Does this finding conflict with your explicit attitudes?

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Answer 1

The explicit and the implicit attitudes are at the conscious and the unconscious levels respectively. Explicit attitude is deliberately performed whereas implicit is involuntarily performed and are unknown to us.

A person gets its explicit attitude from the strength of his/her attitude, where as a person gets an implicit attitude from early experiences, cognitive consistency principal, cultura biases,affective experiences.

No they do not come from same places.