Race and Weapons: An IAT Experiment Julianne Dietz, James Gentry, Erin Huntington, and Karin Schubert

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

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.

Method  N = female Ages  Online study through John Krantz’s “Cognition Laboratory Experiments”  Stimulus Two sets of images: harmless objects and weapons, African American and Caucasian faces

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

Results  Main effect for race African American weapons, Caucasian weapons  Main effect for thing African American weapons, African American objects

Dependent t-tests t(20) = 6.083, p <.001

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)

 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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