Implicit Associations

So I took this quiz a while ago called the Implicit Association Test, which basically gauges how inherently biased a person is. They have a wide range of demonstrations including Age, Weight, Disability, etc. but the two most popular and relevant to this blog are probably the Race and Gender IAT. Essentially what the test does is measure the strength of someone's automatic association and bias towards certain stereotypes by a computer-based detection. So the IAT will require the test taker to immediate categorize two concepts, usually an image, with an attribute such as "male" and "female". It's sensitive enough that the faster responses as classified as easier pairings and are therefore more strongly associated as a bias. Personally, it was really interesting to take the series of IATs because even though I see myself as an open-minded and impartial person, a lot of my results showed that I had some unconscious prejudices. It's crazy to think that so much of our social constructs could be built around the biases that we are, in a way, unaware of, but still affects that kinds of impressions and conclusions we draw without thinking about it. In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell actually referenced an instance in which interestingly, a test taker took the racism test and it showed that he had a strong preference for whites, but upon taking it again he showed he had a slight preference for blacks. The only thing he did differently was that he had been watching the Olympics earlier that day.

I guess it's not all too unsettling though because while social factors might magnify a lot of prejudices, I can see from the posts that as a society, we're realizing the value in breaking these stereotypes down (I love the new J. Crew catalog with the boy with his nails painted pink!). Anyway, by no means is the test fully reliable but it's pretty interesting so you can take any of the tests for yourself and check out your results: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/takeatest.html.