Assessing Children’s Implicit Attitudes Using the Affect Misattribution Procedure

Examining Children's Implicit Racial Attitudes Using Exemplar and Category‐Based Measures

“…Images of eight White and eight Black boys, as well as eight gray squares, were used as the race and neutral primes, respectively. Target images were inkblots that were pretested to be neutral in valence (Williams et al., ). The Child AMP was presented as a judgment game (Payne et al., ) where children were told that they would briefly see inkblots and their task was to indicate whether the inkblot was “nice” or “not so nice” by pressing one of two computer keys.…”

“…Each prime image was seen twice, thus children completed 48 critical trials (White, Black, and neutral primes). To validate the measure, children subsequently completed 32 trials containing normatively positive and negative primes (α = .80; Payne et al., ; Williams et al., ; see Data ). Finally, children completed a Child IAT comparable to the one used in Study 1 (see Data for more information).…”

“…The child-friendly IAT (Child IAT) was modeled after the adult version (Greenwald et al, 2003) with the exception that it consisted entirely of pictorial stimuli (Rutland et al, 2005;Williams, Steele, & Lipman, 2016). The target concept of race was represented by previously unseen color photographs of four Black and four White boys matched for attractiveness and emotional expression.…”

“…To further examine children's implicit attitudes toward racial exemplars, we sought to replicate and extend the findings from Study 1 by administering a different priming measure, the AMP (Payne et al., ), in Study 2. The AMP is ideal for use with children because it requires a limited number of trials and does not rely on response latencies that can be influenced by temporary distractions (Williams et al., ). Despite the reduced number of trials, the AMP demonstrates strong internal consistency and large effect sizes when administered to adults (e.g., Gawronski & De Houwer, ; Payne et al., ).…”

“…Given that we were presenting adult men with neutral emotional expressions, we were able to test the possibility that both older and younger children would fail to show implicit positivity in response to these adult racial ingroup members when not required to categorize the targets by race. We made this prediction as these adult faces might appear serious or stern to children, eliciting more ambivalent affective responses to these racial ingroup exemplars, even among young children for whom race is typically quite salient (see also Steele et al., ; Williams et al., ). However, we anticipated that when required to categorize these faces by race, as was the case when completing the Child IAT, racial bias would again emerge, even in response to adult men with neutral emotional expressions.…”