“Comfort in Social Situations”
There are many tools to evaluate implicit biases, such as surveys and tests. The most popular is the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, which measures association between concepts and evaluations or stereotypes. This test, which was created by Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues, is an online test that is available to the public through Harvard University and has several adaptations, including a Gender-Career IAT, Disability IAT, Age IAT, and others. Although you are not required to complete the IAT for this assignment, feel free to explore the tests and their descriptions.
For this assignment, you will be completing a “Comfort in Social Situations” survey and reflecting on your results. The results of this survey may help identify any implicit biases you may have and how they may impact your communication in the criminal justice field.
Prompt
For this journal assignment, complete the Comfort in Social Situations Worksheet from the Breaking the Prejudice Habit website. You do not need to share your results or hand in this worksheet; this is for your personal reflection only.
Once you receive your results, reflect on them. Were you surprised at the results, or were they what you had expected? What factors or experiences may have contributed to how you responded to the scenarios? Compare your results to your journal response from Module One. Do your results align with the personal factors from Loden’s Wheel that you identified in that journal assignment? Next, identify any implicit biases that you may have, based on your survey results, and any known explicit biases. Lastly, explain how your results, along with any implicit and explicit biases you may have, may impact your communication in the criminal justice field.
Specifically, the following rubric criteria must be addressed:
Reflect on your “Comfort in Social Situations” survey results.
Compare those results to the personal factors from Loden’s Wheel.
Identify any implicit or explicit biases.
Explain how the survey results and your biases may impact communication in the criminal justice field.
Sample Solution
espite efforts by psychologists, political scientists, and sociologists, the only consensus reached regarding the traditional terrorist profile is that a single terrorist profile cannot be determined. In most cases, the personality traits of terrorists are entirely invariable from a non-terrorist, making it incredibly challenging to profile and distinguish a terrorist from any other individual in most settings (Hudson, 1999). Despite the lack of a defined profile, Jerrold M. Post—a professor at George Washington University—believes the generational transmission of extremist beliefs may offer some increased insight (Kershaw, 2010). This generational transmission, Post says, begins at an early age and includes feelings of victimization and alienation, belief that the end will justify the means in a moral sense, fear of religious or nationalist group extinction, and the concept that violence is the only solution (Kershaw, 2010). One of many, this theory offers potential insight into what drives an individual to become a terrorist. The lack of a standard terrorist profile has drawn even further interest by psychologists, political scientists, government officials/agencies, and sociologists in understanding why someone becomes a terrorist. The various psychological and sociological theories may offer some understanding, which will be explored throughout this paper.