Race: May 2008 Archives

You have completed the African American - European American IAT.

Thank you for your participation. Just below is a breakdown of the scores generated by others. Most respondents find it easier to associate African American with Bad and European American with Good compared to the reverse.

Many of the questions that you answered on the previous page have been addressed in research over the last 10 years. For example, the order that you performed the response pairing is influential, but procedural corrections largely eliminate that influence (see FAQ #1). Each visitor to the site completes the task in a randomized order. If you would like to learn more about the IAT, please visit the FAQs and background information section.

You are welcome to try additional demonstration tasks, and we encourage you to register (easy) for the research site where you will gain access to studies about more than 100 topics about social groups, personality, pop culture, and more.

When you are taught a history that does not include you, it could lead
to a feeling of alienation, as though you are not really a Canadian (or
American, or whatever). It's yet another way to feel marginalized, and
I do not think that this marginalization should be blamed on the people
that feel that way. That's simply part of the way that your world has
been framed. Although I strongly identify as Canadian (and Quebecois,
and as a Montrealer) I have never really felt as though I have a stake
in the history, and therefore historical fabric of this country.
English or French people grow up knowing that they are part of a
"good", "valuable", "normal" group that can freely judge other groups
while ignoring certain struggles. Everything begins and ends with them.
This is huge. For me, this hasn't been that much of an issue until
recently, and I can see why it might be for others all the time. I
think that my brother and sisters all reacted to this quite differently
even if they never concretely identified exactly what was going on
growing up. It's like knowing that something is just "off", but not
necessarily knowing what. Anyway, you're too busy trying to fit in, or
preventing your ass from being kicked or spit on.

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.