One thing that I find endlessly fascinating is how people perceive things compared to how they actually are (and I admit that I am taking a rather narrow view of what reality is). One field of psychosocial study involves implicit association tests, or IATs. These tests are designed to determine what people really think about certain things when they are either unwilling or unable to state their true feelings. For example, a person may have a strong bias against gay people, but is unwilling to say so for fear of being stigmatized socially (which I find rather ironic).
Project Implicit is a Harvard University-based research group that specializes in IATs and getting to the bottom of people's views and perceptions. One interesting IAT, for me at least, is the association between ideas of goodness/whiteness, and badness/blackness. I took the test, but I won't reveal my results until some of you have, because I would rather not influence your test-taking. (Although there are controls within the test that are designed to prevent this type of thing, I would rather not take any chances.)
Please take the test here to reveal information about your association of attributes to black and white people. (You may want to read this first, though.) There are many other tests available as well. I particularly encourage the ones about sexism and sexuality, but all of them are revealing. You don't have to, but I would appreciate it if you either left a brief summary of your results in the comments, or posted the full results in your blog, notifying me in the comments. I think it could be an interesting meme. As always, I am looking for similar information in a more local context. For example, is there a good/bad association to being perceived as English or French? I would LOVE to know, especially if the data were broken down by age and geography. I expect the same question for Native Canadians would be glaring.
Project Implicit is a Harvard University-based research group that specializes in IATs and getting to the bottom of people's views and perceptions. One interesting IAT, for me at least, is the association between ideas of goodness/whiteness, and badness/blackness. I took the test, but I won't reveal my results until some of you have, because I would rather not influence your test-taking. (Although there are controls within the test that are designed to prevent this type of thing, I would rather not take any chances.)
Please take the test here to reveal information about your association of attributes to black and white people. (You may want to read this first, though.) There are many other tests available as well. I particularly encourage the ones about sexism and sexuality, but all of them are revealing. You don't have to, but I would appreciate it if you either left a brief summary of your results in the comments, or posted the full results in your blog, notifying me in the comments. I think it could be an interesting meme. As always, I am looking for similar information in a more local context. For example, is there a good/bad association to being perceived as English or French? I would LOVE to know, especially if the data were broken down by age and geography. I expect the same question for Native Canadians would be glaring.
Wow - very interesting. I really enjoyed that. I'm part of the 6% : Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for African American compared to European American.
I'd be very curious to see the results for disabled (considering that's a population of which I am very protective).
Thanks for the link!
It's a built in behavior to recognize likeness quicker. It's the same way wolves can recognize pack members from non-pack members even though to us they all look the same (familiar argument)
I had the same result as V. Interesting tests. I'll have to try some others.