Stereotyping
... going to be a chance of an unconscious display of stereotyping towards those who are not the same as oneself. Implicit stereotyping is a bias that subconsciously emerges from a person’s beliefs. These beliefs can begin to develop as soon as a child grasps the concept that people are different. A research method that Banaji has used in order to discover more about implicit stereotyping comes in the form of a test known as the IAT (or implicit association test). The test has people associate pictures with words. In one experiment white North American middle class children were shown pictures of insect and flowers, as well as pictures of white and black people. At the age of 6 it was determined that children had already begun to show implicit patterns of thought. The children for the most part preferred flowers over insects, and white over black people. It can be seen that even at a young age these ideas of stereotyping begin to occur, since they prefer their own group to an external group. The research from this particular experiment went on to conduct the same test on older age groups, and it could be seen that by the time adulthood was reached the implicit attitudes had severely went down. It can be said that once a person is at a mature level they can hold back certain feelings of prejudice, and stereotype. If this is the case, then it may be that consciously they can suppress their negative attitudes, however they still may maintain these attitudes subconsciously. Implicit stereotypes, can at many times go unnoticed in our everyday lives, and they can occur in even the simplest circumstances. The reason for this according to Banaji is that implicit stereotyping is rooted in our own fundamental mechanics of thought, and we in turn create generalized associations with what we know to be common. An example of this is associating rain with thunder, or summer with warmth. We learn to grow a great amount of trust in the associations, and at times these associations can blind us in an instance where it may not hold true. An example of this would be a rain shower without thunder, or possibly a brisk summer evening. This makes the associations that we believe are always held true mere approximations of what the truth actually may be. With this in mind, it can also create a possibility of negative associations with something very common. The negative association may be the direct result of a first person encounter, or perhaps hearing about something negative from another perso...