Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (11 page)

Table 6.2
Sample IAT procedure 2

relatively easy. ‘Wonderful’ is ‘Good’ so now you should tap the left-hand side of the page, assigning ‘Wonderful’ to the ‘Low Carbon Footprint or Good’ category, and so on.

In
Table 6.2
, the category pairs have been reversed and we have ‘Low Carbon Footprint or Bad’ on the left-hand side of the table versus ‘High Carbon Footprint or Good’ on the right-hand side. The first item is a small eco-friendly car, so you should tap the left-hand side of the page assigning it to the ‘Low Carbon Footprint or Bad’ category because this small car is clearly ‘Low Carbon Footprint’. The psychological reasoning here is that if your underlying unconscious attitude is very pro-low-carbon-footprint products then this will be (relatively speaking) harder to do than the previous task when the categories were paired differently, because the generic category you are assigning it to (‘Low Carbon Footprint or Bad’) also covers words or concepts that are ‘bad’. The second item is ‘Superb’ so you should tap the right-hand side of the page (‘High Carbon Footprint or Good’) because ‘Superb’ clearly is ‘Good’. Again this should be more difficult than before, if you unconsciously do not think that high carbon products are ‘good’. The third item is a low-energy light bulb so you should tap the left-hand side of the page (‘Low Carbon Footprint or Bad’), which is relatively speaking (and again we are talking about milliseconds here) more difficult for most people than the earlier task when the categories were paired in the reverse manner. So go ahead and try it for yourself to work out your own implicit biases.

If you do (in terms of your unconscious attitude) associate low carbon with ‘good’ and high carbon with ‘bad’ then you should have found the first table easier to do than the second. On the second table you may well have noticed a slowing in your reaction time. If, on the other hand, you associate low carbon with ‘bad’ and high carbon with ‘good’ (perhaps because you feel that people are trying to force green issues down your throat) then you should have been faster when categorising items in the second table, and your responses should have been slower when you were categorising items in the first table (‘I was only getting started,’ I hear you say; the mind is after all great at rationalising!).

In Table 6.3, the blocks of trials used in the IAT (with the critical comparison trials outlined in bold) are shown:

The computerised versions of the seven trials are shown in
Figures 6.1
–6.7. This is what the participants actually saw on the computer screen in our IAT.

The D score (or difference score) is the critical measure used in the IAT. This is a statistical measure that calculates both the difference in the latency, or time taken to respond, in the critical trials
and
the error rate. The main point to remember here is: the more positive the D score, the more positive the implicit attitude to low-carbon-footprint products. The actual D scores we found are given in
Table 6.4
.

The results of our carbon footprint IAT revealed that 59% of our participants showed a strong implicit preference for products with a low carbon footprint. An additional 24% showed an implicit bias towards products with a low carbon