MIND.set

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Data-Method-Monitoring Cluster

Project head: Dr. Susanne Veit

Project team members: Hannah Arnu ,  Dr. Stefanie Hechler ,  Dr. Elli Zey

While surveys on experiences of discrimination provide evidence of high prevalence rates (Uslucan & Yalcin 2012) and the extent of right-wing hate crime has increased significantly since 2014 (BMI 2019), large-scale societal surveys, such as the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's "Mitte" studies (Zick, Küpper & Krause 2016), suggest that attitudes in the population towards social minorities and towards immigration and plurality are relatively stable and have hardly changed. This apparent contradiction can be explained in part by the fact that not every attitude is reflected in corresponding behaviour and not every behaviour is accompanied by a corresponding change in attitude, and in part by the fact that survey data on sensitive topics such as experiences or potential for discrimination are subject to strong biases due to socially desirable response behaviour or subjective perspectives.
A good alternative here is to use measurement methods that minimise bias due to socially desirable response behaviour, such as field experiments or indirect measurement methods. Indirect measurement methods focus on reaction times and error rates instead of answers to direct questions - and thus on behaviour that is less subject to volitional control and associated biases than explicitly expressed attitudes. Indirect measurement methods make spontaneous associations and other cognitive processes visible and thus represent an important complement to explicit attitude measurements (Gawronski & Bodenhausen 2006).
For this reason, we developed MIND.set as part of the short projects of the National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa). MIND.set is an online platform for the creation of browser-based online experiments and other indirect measurement procedures that go beyond the possibilities of classic programmes for online surveys (since they rely, for example, on presentation and response times in the range of milliseconds), and their integration into classic online surveys. The Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al. 1998), the Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne et al. 2005), the Police Office Dilemma Task (Correll et al. 2002), the Avoidance Task (Essien et al., 2017) and an adaptation of the Who-Said-What paradigm (Buchner et al., 2008; Hechler et al., 2016) are initially programmed as concrete procedures. MIND.set will be further developed as part of this project so that it can be made available as a resource to other researchers (in the DeZIM research community and beyond). It can then be used to apply the procedures already deposited, but can also be supplemented with further applications through appropriate programming.
The publication of MIND.set is planned for 2024. Validation studies are currently being conducted to examine both the functionality of the platform and the applicability of the procedures in the context of online surveys, legal aspects are being examined and user manuals are being prepared.

Funding: Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (Institutional funding)

Cooperation partner:

There is close cooperation with Iniobong Essien (Leuphana University Lüneburg), who has a high level of expertise in the field of indirect measurement methods, and with Stefanie Hechler from the NaDiRa experiment module.