I just took tests at two sites to determine if I have subconscious racist biases. Here they are:
U Chicago
Harvard [the race IAT]
I first read about these in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and then today in Nicholas Kristof's NY Times column. Apparently whites and blacks alike tend to associate blacks with negative things and whites with positive things. The tests are designed to access the subconscious through mind-numbingly repetitive tasks that measure implicit associations.
So go give them a try.
The U Chicago test has you shooting or choosing to not shoot a series of white and black men holding guns or cell phones. I shot whites with guns faster than blacks and I holstered my gun faster with blacks than with whites [no error bars were quoted, so I don't know if the results were statistically significant, but the difference appeared "large"]. This means that I am subconsciously biased anti-white. The second test is an association test and I scored dead even with no bias. I have many questions/complaints about the methodology but the general conclusion is that I test marvelously bias-free!
Everybody let me know how you do... and whether you measure up to my lofty precedent of high-minded anti-European American bigotry.
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2 comments:
My issue with the first test was simply that I had trouble identifying the object being held in certain situations. I'm not sure if that washed out the stats or not, but it is a source of periodic delay. May challenge the validity? I dunno. That said, it was interesting. It revealed (or purported to) that I made quicker decisions about white cell-phone holders than black ones, and quicker decisions about black cell-phone holders than white ones, which definitely seems to show a bias.
On the Harvard test, I came down as "race-neutral," whatever that means. Since I had self-evaluated the same way, it confirms my bias (so to speak) and so I accept the whole thing without critical analysis.
OK, so that's a cop-out. I would say that a couple of the faces seemed kind of angry or arrogant or something. I think it might be better having more emotionless expressions or straight-on pictures (I associate a head tipped back as arrogant and flaring or pointed nostrils as angry--although these seemed to be evenly distributed between the races in the pictures).
My thoughts.
Charles Emerson Winchester, III
You don't buy that do you? I took a similar test grouping negative and positive things into black white categories. The classical conditioning response may be to strong to to create an accurate conclusion. Maybe these tests are to help us refocus on being an anti-anti. Love one another!!!
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