Implicit Attitudes
Rudman and Goodwin (2004) report that women show greater "in-group bias" than men; that is, women like women more than men like men. Rudman and Goodwin's four experiments used implicit association testing (IAT) to assess favorable attitudes towards a particular gender group. Harvard's Project Implicit gives a deeper explanation of IAT and allows people to take implicit association exercises at home. In short, IAT measures response time to associate positive or negative connotations to a particular categorization, with longer response times supposedly representing a less-believed association.
IAT is largely used to determine which is more positively viewed between two options by the subject. These results are often compared against explicit testing, where the subject is asked directly what they believe. Other gender divided uses of IAT have included Andrew Karpinksi's (2004) finding that women had marginally higher implicit self-esteem than men, but that men scored higher on explicit measures of self-esteem (using traditional testing methods). Geer and Robertson (2005) found that women had more negative associations with sex, sexually charged words, and sexuality than men, consistent with explicit measures. Interestingly, Milne and Grafman (2001) found that patients with prefrontal cortex lesions did not show gender-stereotyped implicit associations.
I suspect, although I haven't tested on it, that I have an implicit bias against IAT. It's probably because I don't like what it says about me. I certainly have issues with explicit self-report measures as well, and at least this makes another tool available. Still, as a language-driven, mental flexibility "game", it seems as though there would be a difference in how men and women scored on the tests in general. However, I've seen no studies examining between-subject differences in reponse latency.
IAT is largely used to determine which is more positively viewed between two options by the subject. These results are often compared against explicit testing, where the subject is asked directly what they believe. Other gender divided uses of IAT have included Andrew Karpinksi's (2004) finding that women had marginally higher implicit self-esteem than men, but that men scored higher on explicit measures of self-esteem (using traditional testing methods). Geer and Robertson (2005) found that women had more negative associations with sex, sexually charged words, and sexuality than men, consistent with explicit measures. Interestingly, Milne and Grafman (2001) found that patients with prefrontal cortex lesions did not show gender-stereotyped implicit associations.
I suspect, although I haven't tested on it, that I have an implicit bias against IAT. It's probably because I don't like what it says about me. I certainly have issues with explicit self-report measures as well, and at least this makes another tool available. Still, as a language-driven, mental flexibility "game", it seems as though there would be a difference in how men and women scored on the tests in general. However, I've seen no studies examining between-subject differences in reponse latency.