Assignment: Thank you for participating!
The sorting test you just took is called the Evaluative Priming Task.
Here is your result in the Evaluative Priming Task:
Your data suggest no automatic preference between the word that stopped unpleasant visions and the word that stopped pleasant visions. Need Assignment Help?
What Is An Automatic Preference?
An automatic evaluation is a person's very first quick judgment of objects, people, and social groups. An automatic evaluation can be activated very quickly, effortlessly, and unintentionally. Automatic preference refers to a more positive automatic evaluation of one object or person than of another object or person. Sometimes, the automatic preference is different from the preference that the person consciously and explicitly endorses. For instance, a person might endorse an equal evaluation of two objects (words, people, social groups), but still show an automatic preference for one of these objects over the other. Some researchers argue that the automatic evaluation might influence people's behavior, especially when the behavior is done under conditions that reduce people's ability to control their behavior.
Disclaimer:
These results are not a definitive assessment of your automatic preference. The results may be influenced by variables that not related to your automatic evaluation (e.g., momentary variations in how focused you were during the task). The results are provided for educational purposes only. You completed this study in Project Implicit's research section, in which we test new measures, tools and open questions in social psychology. This study is not supposed to test whether you have any implicit bias, or prejudice.
How Does Evaluative Priming Work?
Your result was described as an 'automatic preference for the word that stopped pleasant visions' if you were faster in categorizing Positive words when they appeared after the word that stopped pleasant visions than when they appeared after the word that stopped unpleasant visions, and faster in categorizing Negative words when they appeared after the word that stopped unpleasant visions than when they appeared after the word that stopped pleasant visions. Conversely, your score was described as an 'automatic preference for the word that stopped unpleasant visions' if the opposite occurred. The idea is that seeing a fictional word that you like makes it easier to identify positive words, and seeing a fictional word that you dislike makes it easier to identify negative words.
What was this study about?
In this study, we are testing what influences automatic preference more - a mere link between specific fictional words and emotions or the reason for that link. For example, when a word stops unpleasant visions, it is linked to negative objects (the unpleasant photos). However, the reason for the link is that the word stops those visions. Therefore, although this word is linked with negative photos, the word is actually positive because it helps you rather than harms you.
Some researchers have proposed that the mere link, in memory, between a specific object (.e.g., a fictional word) and emotions, governs the automatic evaluation of the object. According to these researchers, automatic evaluation does not take into account the reason for the link. Based on this theory, people would have an automatic negative reaction to a word that stopped unpleasant events, despite the fact that this "magic" word helped them.
Other researchers believe that automatic preference is not governed by mere links between an object and an emotion. Rather, automatic preference is sensitive to the reason behind this link, the relation between the object and the emotion. In that case, most of our participants would show a preference for the effect of 'stopping negative visions' over 'stopping positive visions'. In this study, we are testing which of the two theories is more accurate.