Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Zhu (2017) used the implicit association test (IAT) to assess metaphorical alignment between concepts such as black andwhite and good and evil. Here we asked whether self-identified Black people have similar metaphoric alignments as thosewho identify as White. In an initial experiment, we tested pairwise metaphoric associations between black and white, dirtyand clean, and good and evil. Measured strength of the 3 alignment pairings for these 3 sets of concepts was statistically thesame among Black participants as that measured by Zhu for white participants. In a follow-up experiment, we comparedself-identified Black and White participants IAT-scores for race (i.e., faces) and for color (i.e., chess pieces) IATs. ForWhite participants, mean strength of white-positive alignment was identical for race and color; Black participants showedonly slight white-positive bias for race IATs, and an intermediate level of white-positive bias for color IATs.