Well with the final blog for this semester i’m going to discuss how psychology studies can be funny and yield some interesting data. I’m going to discuss a study by Bones, A.K., & Johnson using the implicit association test. The title of the study gives it away that it is going to be quite satrical – Measuring the immeasurable: Or “Could Abraham Lincoln Take the Implicit Association Test”. This is a within designed measure used to detect the strength of a person’s automatic association between mental representations of objects. The two unborn hav researchers decided to tap into the untapped population of unborn children for the IAT test. They decided to present the hypothesis of do the unborn have an innate gender identity.Bones described them “Like people at airports, the unborn have very little to do and are confined to close quarters,” making the ideal test subjects. Although this does present a challenge as the unborn don’t understand words but this did not stop these brave researchers.Using a iat measure which is normally related to a computer measure but can be used via audio or sound, Bones and Johnson sought to determine whether unborn infants tend to associate “Me” with a gender identity and “Not Me” with a different gender identity. They found that Male and female fetuses showed the same level of association with both gender identities (the mean reaction time for all three groups for both identities was 3 seconds) who would have thought.
Now They then did a second study into this idea on another population, this time round, dead people. They point out that the work of people like M. Night Shyamalan has called into question the validity of people’s self-report about whether they’re alive or dead so this study could be devastatingly groundbreaking. They had dead people associate words related death ( “joined the choir of the invisible”) and words related to life ( “still kicking”) with either “me” or “not me.” The difference wasn’t supremely significant but they did find that dead people were faster in associating dead words with “me” and alive words with “not me” (2.9995 s) than alive words with “me” and dead words with “not me” (3 s). So therefore abraham lincoln and all those undead people out there could take the IATand realise that yes…they are dead and unborn babies don’t really have a gender identity. I think it’s safe to say that this is a pretty good quantitative technique and should be explored into other untapped populations like if chicken farmers have a deep maternal love for colnel sanders. A silly study with some interesting results wouldn’t you say?
http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/12/i_see_dead_people_taking_the_i.php
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