Who is he? Who is she?

I am in love with crime investigation shows. Today, while laying around my dorm room and eating dinner I watched one of my favorites, called NCIS. They were interviewing a potential suspect. I recognized how they judge people to see if they could fit the criteria of a 'killer'.  The officers were judging a male, in which they described as "dark, tall and potentially dangerous because of his affiliation with the Taliban." When they were hunting down this potential suspect, there was many men who fit his description and one of the officers was saying how difficult it was going to be to spot him. After they found him, he was tackled to the ground. They took no time in getting to know him or even checking if he was the man they were looking for. They took him for his reputation of being dangerous, and assumed that he was up to no good (which he wasn't).

We take people at face value all the time. But, why is that okay? Why isn't  priority for people to get to know one another and just base their assumptions off of reputations?

This also brings up another question, why do we as people automatically assume people of a particular group act a certain way? After September 11, we classify people from the Middle East as all being bad or part of the Taliban. Which is completely untrue and unreasonable. Society groups people into what they want to see. If someone acts a certain way, they must be associated with a negative force. If society took the time to understand who people are, then our world would be a different place. 

TAT..What do your words really mean?

After learning about different types of personality testing in our class,  I've become eager to see what professionals have to say about me. So, today I took a TAT which stands for Thematic Appreciation Test. This type of test is used to see how people reveal themselves through writing after looking and describing a picture for ten minutes. The words are then analyzed and produces a personality assessment. 

Here is the picture that is commonly used in TAT. 

After taking my test, it gave me feedback on the analysis of my words. It stated that the most common themes that are emphasizes the nature of the experiment or scientific discovery, friendship between the two women and status difference of the two women. I found it funny how I fit into the most common group as I wrote about a scientific discovery.
While analyzing the words they look at 8 different categories. The need for achievement, need for affiliation, need for power, self-references, positive emotion words, negative emotion words, and the use of big words. After looking at each of those categories, you can put them all together and look at the bigger picture.

I think that this test can be useful but also has it faults. Each of the categories that are analyzed are subject to change on how your emotions are that day. If I was in a bad mood perhaps I'd write a short story saying that after years of hard work there experiment had no results. It would change my personality assessment. Or if i typed big words (more than 6 letters) throughout the whole story but I used them all wrong, or had no idea what they actually meant. This test does have it's positives but it may have more faults.

Interested in taking a Thematic Assessment Test? Here is the link that I used...
http://www.utpsyc.org

IAT test: Association between Male and Female with Science or Liberal Arts

Yesterday in my Personality Psychology class, I had the pleasure of taking my first IAT test which was trying to see if there was an association between Male and Female with Science and Liberal Arts. It asked whether I believed Science or Liberal Arts was more Male or Female dominated.

My results concluded that I had no association between Male and Female with Science or Liberal Arts. The test was trying to distinguish the 'automatic association between Male and Science.'
I believe that I have no association between a male or female dominated field because I have grown up in a generation of women and men both doing whatever they want for a career. The boundary line saying what we can and cannot do is slowly breaking down. There's no such thing as 'no you can't work in this field because you are a women or a man', which may have been the case 30 years ago. I am lucky that I have the opportunity to do what I love, and not be limited due to my gender.

Below, is the complied data of everyone that has taken this test, which was generated after I completed the test. It's interesting to read this table that majority of the people still have a moderate or stronger association of Male with Science ad Female with Liberal Arts.  There was a drastic change in percentages when the association between Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts changed to Male with Liberal Arts and Female with Science.  I wonder if generations to come if these percentages will keep changing to the point where it is equal to be a male in science in liberal arts and females in science and liberal arts. Gender shouldn't define what field you can work in.



(Harvard IAT testing, 2014).


Interested in taking an IAT test? Here is the link that I used.. Enjoy!

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1