Research On Implicit Attitudes Of College Students Toward People With Disabilities

According to the results of the second national sample survey of people with disabilities, the current number of people with disabilities in our country is more than eighty million. As an important part of human society, the problem of people with disabilities has always been concerned by our society. At present, the domestic psychologists made a lot of explorations on public attitudes toward people with disabilities, however, most of the previous studies have investigated the explicit attitudes toward people with disabilities, while researches on implicit attitudes are insufficient. The situation and the large number of people with disabilities are seriously imbalanced. In the present study, we choose college students as subjects to investigate implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities, and analysis the relationship between implicit attitude and explicit attitudes. On these bases, we try to explore the contextual effect and the interference strategy of college students' implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities.The study is divided into three experiments: Experiment 1 uses AMP paradigm, randomly selected 62 college students to investigate implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes toward people with disabilities, then discuss the relationship between the two kinds of attitudes in the case of matching structural differences. Implicit attitude uses 2(subject gender: male and female)×3(implicit priming type: disabled pictures, neutral pictures and non-disabled pictures)two factors mixed design, and subject gender is between-subjects variable, implicit priming type is within-subject variable. Explicit attitude uses 2(subject gender: male and female)×2(explicit evaluating type: disabled pictures and non-disabled pictures)two factors mixed design, and subject gender is between-subjects variable, implicit priming type is within-subject variable.Based on the results of implicit attitude in experiment 1, experiment 2 adds a contextual variable. In the study, we randomly selected 89 college students as subjects, using 2(priming subject type: disabled person, non-disabled person)×3(situation type: ability positive words, ability negative words and neutral words) two factors mixed design, and priming subject type is within-subject variable, situation priming type is between-subjects variable. The study aims at exploring whether college students' implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities were influenced by different ability situations.Experiment 3 chooses subliminal evaluative conditioning, randomly selected 62 college students as subjects, using 2(groups: experimental group and control group) ×2(test sequence: pre-test and post-test) two factors mixed design, and groups is between-subjects variable, test sequence is within-subject variable. This experiment aims at discussing the possibility of using subliminal evaluative conditioning to change the negative implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities, and providing methodological basis for improving implicit attitude for them.The conclusions of these three experiments show that:(1)College students show a common negative implicit attitude towards people with disabilities;(2)College students' attitudes toward people with disabilities has no relationship with their genders;(3)The relationship between implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes are influenced by the structure consistency of the measuring methods;(4)College students' explicit attitudes toward people with disabilities are more positive than implicit attitudes, and these two attitudes show a certain degree of separation;(5)College students' explicit attitudes toward people with disabilities are easily affected by contextual factors; students' implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities in ability positive situation are better than students in ability negative situation and neutral situation;(6)Subliminal evaluative conditioning can change the negative implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities, and it has a better effect to enhance the positive implicit attitudes.