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Michael A Olson

Publications and source records attributed to Michael A Olson.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Reducing automatically activated racial prejudice through implicit evaluative conditioning.

The authors report a set of experiments that use an implicit evaluative conditioning procedure to reduce automatically activated racial prejudice in White participants in a short period and with relatively few trials. Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants were unaware of the repeated conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) pairings of Black-good and White-bad. In Experiment 2, the procedure was found to be effective in reducing prejudice as indicated by an evaluative priming measure of automatically activated racial attitudes. In Experiment 3, this reduction in prejudice was found to persist throughout a 2-day separation between the conditioning procedure and the administration of the dependent measure. The implications of the present findings for the persistence of automatically activated racial prejudice are discussed.

Attitude↗

Reducing the influence of extrapersonal associations on the Implicit Association Test: personalizing the IAT.

The authors argue that the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A.G. Greenwald, D.E. McGhee, & J.L.K. Schwartz, 1998) can be contaminated by associations that do not contribute to one's evaluation of an attitude object and thus do not become activated when one encounters the object but that are nevertheless available in memory. The authors propose a variant of the IAT that reduces the contamination of these "extrapersonal associations." Consistent with the notion that the traditional version of the IAT is affected by society's negative portrayal of minority groups, the "personalized" IAT revealed relatively less racial prejudice among Whites in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiments 3 and 4, the personalized IAT correlated more strongly with explicit measures of attitudes and behavioral intentions than did the traditional IAT. The feasibility of disentangling personal and extrapersonal associations is discussed.

Adult↗

Relations between implicit measures of prejudice:what are we measuring?

Some recent findings suggest that different implicit measures of prejudice assess the same underlying construct, but other work suggests that they may not. In this experiment, White participants completed a version of a priming measure of racial attitudes that either encouraged categorization of the face primes in terms of race or did not encourage such categorization, and then completed the Implicit Association Test. Correspondence between the two measures was found only when categorization by race was required on the priming measure. Moreover, participants appeared more prejudiced when they were led to construe individuals in terms of race than when they were not so encouraged. The discussion focuses on the potential for dissociations between evaluations of a category and evaluations of members of the category.

Ethnicity↗

Implicit measures in social cognition. research: their meaning and use.

Behavioral scientists have long sought measures of important psychological constructs that avoid response biases and other problems associated with direct reports. Recently, a large number of such indirect, or "implicit," measures have emerged. We review research that has utilized these measures across several domains, including attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes, and discuss their predictive validity, their interrelations, and the mechanisms presumably underlying their operation. Special attention is devoted to various priming measures and the Implicit Association Test, largely due to their prevalence in the literature. We also attempt to clarify several unresolved theoretical and empirical issues concerning implicit measures, including the nature of the underlying constructs they purport to measure, the conditions under which they are most likely to relate to explicit measures, the kinds of behavior each measure is likely to predict, their sensitivity to context, and the construct's potential for change.

Attitude↗