Comment on The Implicit Association Test

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:11:11 GMT

Yeah, though actually I was thinking that specifically training oneself toward doing "well" on the IAT would more or less retrain the brain to associate various things, since when taking the IAT, well, you have to make (or break) certain patters, so training oneself to do faster on the IAT (I'd suspect) may shift the various patterns.

ie, over and over training your brain to do that task quickly, well, the actual way your brain might respond to speed it up would be to shift the associations to, well, speed it up. Maybe. (at least, given my profoundly limited knowledge of cogsci, I don't see any obvious implausibility here, but...)

As I said, I'd like to see some experimentation along those lines...

Actually, also I wonder if the IAT can be generalized to the more abstract type of bias talked about here and on OB. ie, can a variation be set up that sets up/activates the various cog biases, and to do well at it one would have to break those patterns somehow?

Actually, you know... "does it work in reverse?" sounds like the type of thing that others may have already thought of. Anyone here know if there's already been some investigation into that?

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