Week 3: Race-Weapons IAT

My results for this Implicit Association Test (IAT) suggested "a moderate association of Black Americans with Weapons compared to White Americans," which is on par with the results of the majority of web respondents.



Although I do think that my results could have been skewed slightly higher because of the order in which the response pairing was performed, I am not surprised with the overall results.

My whole life I've lived in areas with extremely small percentages of Black residents. In that situation, the places where you see the most representation of Black Americans is on television, which usually occurs during the nightly news and involves crimes. One study found that "Blacks were twice as likely as Whites to be portrayed as perpetrators of crime on local television news," and in addition were overrepresented as criminals in news coverage compared to actual arrests by 16 percent (Dixon & Linz, 2000). I believe this contributes to stereotypes and the association of weapons with Blacks, hence the results of this IAT. Seventy-two percent of respondents associated Blacks with weapons in contrast to the 29 percent who were either neutral (19 percent) or associated Whites with weapons (10 percent).

References
Dixon, T. L., & Linz, D. G. (2000). Overrepresentation and underrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos as lawbreakers on television news. Journal of Communication, 50(2), 131-154.