Tony Greenwald Wins the William James Fellow Award

From the Washington Daily (an article about Situationist friend Tony Greenwald): Even though a black man sits in the White House, and a gay woman legislates in the Senate, according to nearly two decades of research by a professor of psychology at the UW, Anthony Greenwald, most people are racially, ethnically, religiously, or sexually biased. In 1995, Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and uncovered this disturbing truth. Last week, for this contribution to the field of scientific psychology, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) announced they would present the William James Fellow Award to Greenwald at the APS’s 25th anniversary celebration. When the test was first developed, Greenwald said he began administering the IAT on UW undergraduate students from psychology classes — and the results were shocking. The test revealed the majority of students, especially caucasians and asians, showed an “automatic white preference.” Since then the test has been tweaked, improved, and used in contemporary instances. Greenwald analyzed election results with the IAT. “We found that Obama suffered by being black,” Greenwald said. “He got fewer votes because of race biases.” Greenwald explained the IAT tries to tease out hidden associations made by our unconscious. It accomplishes this by measuring the time it takes our brain to sort words and images. Researchers can discover how closely a participant’s brain instinctivel...
Source: The Situationist - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Tags: Awards Implicit Associations Source Type: blogs