I. I took the IAT Test. My results are: slight association of male with competence and female with warmth compared to female with competence and male with warmth.
II. I was surprised that I got a slight rating. I thought it would be either towards men and women. It also shows that I have a biased view on some things as it relates to men and women.
III. The process of learning is a culmination of activities that we have done in the past but we are adding new concepts to it in the classroom. Association tends to pick parts of your memory so that it can associate it with new elements that you are learning. If our brains don't associate new things with old concepts, we will not be able to remember what we are learning.
IV. Passage 1: For, as teachers, it is the fact of association that practically concerns you, let its grounds be spiritual and cerebral or what they may, and let its laws be reducible, or non-reducible, to one. (James, pg.41, 1962)
Passage 2: Their education consists in the organizing within them of determinate tendencies to associate one thing with another-impressions with consequences, these with reactions, those with results, and so on, indefinitely.
Antoinette-
ReplyDeleteI found the IAT test interesting too. I took that test as well! Do you think the results are due to the fact that we live in a society that tends to be gender role-specific (e.g. men are supposed to be rough and tough; women are supposed to be warm and caring)? I know the lecture we listened to and Gladwell (2005) both discussed how our schemas play a role in our subconscious decisions. What do you think?
Renee,
ReplyDeleteI think that we have been conditioned by society to think that certain words exemplify a woman and other words describe a man. It is so sad because we think of men as a leader and not as nice. We look at women as sweet and not as diplomatic. Schemas are an important part of who we are and how we think. We use schemas so that we can associate our thinking with new concepts and ideas. But our schemas can lead us to think that certain things are gender specific when they should be used in both genders. Why does society focus so much on gender?