Summary: Implicit And Iplicit Prejudice

Prejudice is one of the plights of that afflicts mankind. It has shown itself throughout history in many different forms however none as often as racial prejudice. Race has been something that has been studied for centuries. In the early 1800’s scientists believed that one’s race would affect mental capacity as well as how able people are able to complete certain tasks. Race was also used to determine a person’s status in society in many parts of the world. The lasting effects of these beliefs in race have created a culture of racial prejudice. There are two types of prejudice, explicit and implicit prejudice. These two types of prejudice are extremely different however they offer very applicable data for employers and in learning about how
Implicit prejudice is a person’s unconscious feelings towards a subject. Implicit prejudice isn’t that a person is trying to cover up a feeling but instead a person simply doesn’t know that they have the feelings. The feelings were often caused by something in their past. For example a person who was raised in a small community with negative feelings towards a specific race will retain negative feelings towards that race long into their adulthood. (Brandt and Reyna, 2014) Measurement of implicit prejudice is also more complicated. A questionnaire such as the ones used for explicit prejudice will not work since the person who has the prejudice doesn’t know that they have the prejudice. Instead the test used is called the Implicit Association Test. This test, pioneered by Harvard University, involves the use of pictures and terms. The terms can be both positive and negative terms. The pictures are people of different races. A person without implicit will associate the terms with the correct race as told to do so. However, a person with an implicit prejudice will take longer to associate the positive terms with the race he or she has a prejudice against. That is he or she will still associate them as told to do so however there will be a delay that the computer can measure. The problem with this test, however, relies on the fact that a person can make mistakes on trying to hit the buttons. The more
Explicit prejudice test can be used in any case where answering a certain way will not affect the test taker. For instance, at a job interview the test take will always answer the way that a he or she believes the interviewer will want them to answer. Although this means that the interviewer will have to determine if the interviewee is lying or not. The Implicit Association Test will not help with this. If a person is consciously aware of the prejudice they have and they are aware of how the test work they can simply answer wrong enough times in order to invalidate the test or they can slow their response time enough on the opposite group they are not prejudice enough in order to make the results appear skewed the opposite way of how they really feel. The only way for the Implicit Association Test to work is that the person taking the test must not know about the prejudice they have. These test can be applied to real world situations. An example where the Implicit Association Test was successfully applied was nurses working with substance abuse patients. Nurses before beginning a job which involved working with substance abuse patients were given the Implicit Association Test dealing with substance abusers. Their results were not revealed to them. How long they continued to work at the job. The test revealed that women who stayed the shortest had the highest