Do you have an unconscious preference for white people over black no matter what your race is? Do you have strong associations between weapons and people of one race? Do you have a gender or age bias? Or do you honestly think you don’t have biases?
Now you can discover the unvarnished truth about these and other questions for yourself using the online Implicit Association Test (IAT). The results you get may surprise you. And they have been confirmed by a recent new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by researchers from the University of Washington.
Being black doesn’t give me a pass on unconscious negative feelings about African-Americans.” —Raina Kelley, writer for Newsweek Magazine.
The Implicit Association Test, launched as a demonstration site by Yale University in 1998 is now the project of a network of laboratories, technicians, and research scientists at Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia. It was fully funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 2003. The tests have been part of a hands-on museum exhibit and there have been more than 4.5 million demonstration tests since 1998.
The nature of the test, using visual associations, allows you to see the truth even if you are unable or unwilling to know of your own biases consciously.
The unwilling-unable distinction is like the difference between purposely hiding something from others and unconsciously hiding something from yourself. The Implicit Association Test makes it possible to penetrate both of these types of hiding. The IAT measures implicit attitudes and beliefs that people are either unwilling or unable to report.” —from the IAT website
One of the most important findings of this test is that implicit biases are pervasive. For example over 80% of respondents show negativity toward the elderly compared to the young and an implicit preference for racial White was shown relative to Black by 75-80% of self identified Whites and Asians.
Other broad conclusions are that people are typically unaware of their own implicit biases-even when being honest, yet their behavior is influenced by these unconscious biases.
The study also show that there is a wide range of individual results, so you may find it interesting to discover what your implicit biases really are by taking a few of the online tests at the Project Implicit website.
