Day 161 MCAT Practice Question

Passage 6

With an increasing array of innovations and research emerging from low-income

countries there is a growing recognition that even high-income countries could

learn from these contexts. It is well known that the source of a product influences

perception of that product, but little research has examined whether this applies

also in evidence-based medicine and decision-making. In order to examine

likely barriers to learning from low-income countries, this study uses established

methods in cognitive psychology to explore whether healthcare professionals and

researchers implicitly associate good research with rich countries more so than

with poor countries.

[A] Computer-based Implicit Association Test (IAT) [was] distributed to healthcare

professionals and researchers. Stimuli representing Rich Countries were chosen

from OECD members in the top ten (>$36,000 per capita) World Bank rankings and

Poor Countries were chosen from the bottom thirty (<$1000 per capita) countries

by GDP per capita, in both cases giving attention to regional representation. Stimuli

representing Research were descriptors of the motivation (objective/biased), value

(useful/worthless), clarity (precise/vague), process (transparent/dishonest), and

trustworthiness (credible/unreliable) of research.

Three hundred twenty one tests were completed in a four-week period between

March and April 2015. The mean Implicit Association Test result…for the sample

was 0.57 (95% CI 0.52 to 0.61) indicating that on average our sample exhibited

moderately strong implicit associations between Rich Countries and Good

Research. People over 40 years of age were less likely to exhibit pro-poor implicit

associations, and being a peer reviewer contributes to a more pro-poor association.

The majority of our participants associate Good Research with Rich Countries,

compared to Poor Countries. Implicit associations such as these might disfavor

research from poor countries in research evaluation, evidence-based medicine and

diffusion of innovations.

Measuring the bias against low-income country research: an Implicit Association

Test. Adapted from Harris et al. (2017).

Which of the following is the strongest example of ethnocentrism?

A) Neglecting friendship with people of other races because of obvious

language barriers

B) Opting to spend time with peers with whom one shares mutual interests

and values

C) Discounting foreign cultural practices without making any effort to

understand them

D) Preferring one’s own family members to individuals of a another’s family