Abstract:

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is widely used in the research examining adults’ biases. The IAT measures differential association of two target concepts with an attribute, typically as a means to examine the extent to which social categories have positive or negative associations. One limitation of this method is that it has high executive function demands and is consequently not appropriate for use with young children. In the present research we address this limitation by developing a version of the task that can be used during the preschool years, which we refer to as the Preschooler-friendly IAT (PSF-IAT). In Study 1, we validated the effectiveness of the PSF-IAT in a non-social domain, by using it to detect presumed near-universal evaluative association involving the contrasts of flowers versus insects. In Study 2, we validated the effectiveness of the PSF-IAT in a social domain, by using it to document yound Chinese children’s racial bias against Africans, and show that the assessment of this bias was correlated with another implicit assessment.

Key words: implicit association test, preschooler, racial attitudes