Religion careers and gender (IAT)

The IAT is performed through word and image association. There are two headings at the top of the page that you associate a random word with. Each word goes with only one of the heading choices. This task is first completed for two separate sets of headings, and then the four headings are put together. For example GOOD and BAD may be one heading set and MALE and FEMALE may be another heading set.

I chose to do the IAT for the participant observer blog. I chose to do the religion and the gender-career IATs. The religion IAT was not exactly consistant with my conscious beliefs, as the IAT showed me as having a preference of Judaism over other religions, but I do not have a preference to any religion. The gender-career IAT showed me as associating males with careers and females with family, but I do not associate either male or females with only one of these aspects consciuosly. I feel that it is most likely that the reason for the results I obtained in both of the tests was due to the fact that I did not take the time to properly associate the appropriate letter on the keyboard with the headings to assign the words to. I believe that the IAT is showing cultural associations more than anything. I do not feel that the results of the IAT changed my feelings about prejudice and stereotypes. I don’t believe that it changed the way I feel about religion because I do not claim a religion and I feel that although all religions do have a few good ideas to them they are still just human constructs that are inherently flawed. I feel that the IAT did not change my feelings on the gender and its association with careers and family, because I know that it is common for women to be associated with family and men to be associated with work outside of the house. The test that I chose to retake was the gender-career IAT because the results were the opposite of my conscious beliefs. I took more time to remember the positioning of the titles at the top of the page that I was supposed to associate the words with befoe starting the association task, and managed to change my results to my conscious beliefs. All in all I do not think that the IAT is a valid measure of a persons beliefs.