Race and Weapons: An IAT Experiment

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Race and Weapons An IAT Experiment

• Julianne Dietz, James Gentry, Erin Huntington,
  and Karin Schubert

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Literary Review

• (Smith-McLallen, Johnson, Dovidio, Pearson,
  2006)
• Positive associations to the color white, while
  negative associations to the color black
• Previous IAT White names/faces with positive
  words, Black names/faces with negative words,
  paired faster

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Research Question

• Will this trend continue when harmless objects
  are used as positive things and weapons are used
  as negative things?
• It is hypothesized that participants reaction
  time will be faster when responding to African
  American faces paired with weapons and Caucasian
  faces paired with objects.

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Method

• N 20
• 11 female
• Ages 19-22
• Online study through John Krantzs Cognition
  Laboratory Experiments
• Stimulus
• Two sets of images harmless objects and weapons,
  African American and Caucasian faces

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Procedure

• Students agreed to participate in study
• Completed 5 conditions of study
• Testing conditions were randomly assigned

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Results

• Main effect for race
• African American weapons, Caucasian weapons
• Main effect for thing
• African American weapons, African American objects

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Dependent t-tests
t(20) 6.083, p lt .001
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Discussion

• Hypothesis was supported
• African American weapons and Caucasian objects
  had faster reaction times
• Similar to results from previous research
• (Smith-McLallen, Johnson, Dovidio, Pearson,
  2006)

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• Limitations
• Lack of diversity in sample of participants
• Future direction
• Run study at a larger university with more
  diverse sample
• Possibly test only African American participants
• Greater age variation

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