The Implicit Association Test was a very interesting test to take, I decided to take the tests concerning weight and age to see what sort of association i may have. Honestly while taking the tests though they seemed to be akin to quick time events. I understand that they want the answers as quick as possible so that it is just your basic opinion and you don’t really have time to consider your answer or what you press, but I find it difficult to understand why this gives a result as to preference. Would the answer that you are associated with come from the side that you answered the fastest ? If so that does not make a lot of sense to me since the test seemed to just be a way of categorizing silhouettes and negative or positive words. Now if the test had left it more open to interpretation by having a lot of different sized silhouettes maybe I could see that happening. Using that test one could see what size a certain person considers as skinny and how much weight someone has to have to be classified as fat in their eyes. By doing this and removing the aspect of an X popping up if you typed the wrong answer I think it would all ow the test to be a bit more open in terms of people learning from it and applying it. Instead though the silhouettes used in this test were very distinctly one or the other. It was either some very skinny people or some overweight people there wasn’t really a middle ground where it could go either way. Then I began to think that perhaps the test went off a sort of connotation, because I began to see patterns in the test where skinny people and positive words occurred together a lot, whereas negative words occurred with the fat silhouettes. This was flipped during the fifth part of the test which makes me feel like that is what they could be testing for. They test how fast you can react using the constants where you are just identifying one thing then by using how you associate with the words if you believe being skinny is more positive you will be quicker during that round whereas if you believe being fat is more positive you will answer faster during that specific round. If that is the case then that is very interesting and has potential although there are still quite a few flaws I see in it. After taking this test I do not know if I will be able to use it later on in life, but I am definitely interested in it so I wonder what sort of capabilities these tests have.
Sources:https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
