Impact of Media Consumption on Automatic Associations

The concept of studying media’s effects on implicit and explicit bias has been studied many times in the field of psychology. Previous research has shown exposure to media coverage containing stereotypes of minorities increased implicit bias (Arendt & Northup, 2015; Dixon & Maddox, 2005; Arendt et al., 2015) and explicit bias (Arendt et al., 2015). This pool of research has previously focused on crime stories and right-wing political advertisements that contain stereotypical tropes of out-group minorities. In these studies, generally, there has been an effect such that priming stereotypes surrounding dark-skinned individuals, may activate automatic associative stereotypes, such as the “Black Criminal” (Dixon & Maddox, 2005). For our study, we wanted to build upon this research and test the effects of right-wing news media priming African American stereotypes and how they increase implicit bias via race (African American vs. European American) Implicit Association Test. We hypothesized that consuming right-wing news stereotyping African Americans would increase implicit bias, measured by higher rates of automatic preference for European American (white) faces on the race IAT. The participant survey is 46 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory psychology courses, 27 members of the Black Student Association, and 27 Belmont students recruited via the researchers. BSA members were included to increase the diversity of responses and strengthen the validity of our results. The introductory psychology students participated for class credit. Participants were asked to read two news articles discussing the Black Lives Matter protests. Participants were in one of three groups: high-exposure (Breitbart and Fox News articles), low-exposure (Breitbart and CNN), and no exposure (CNN only). After reading the articles, participants were tasked with taking the race IAT and a post-intervention questionnaire. Results will be presented at SURS