Racial Prejudice Test

Submitted by Lance on

Check out the Implicit Association Test at Understanding Prejudice (link via Jim Buie). The test purports to determine the taker's preference -- either for white people or black people -- and to say roughly how strong that preference is. If you take the test, come back and discuss it in the comments -- I'm curious to hear what the BlueNC community thinks of it.

EDIT: I posted before seeing the next post on Jim's blog, "Does Racial Prejudice Predict Voting?" One word: yikes!

Comments

Thanks, mom.

Submitted by Lance on

"Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for African American compared to European American." I hold my mother responsible for this result. One of my earliest firm memories is of the day I noticed that not everybody is the same color. (I grew up in a suburban bedroom community, so this revelation probably came a little late for me.) I asked my mother about it, and I remember that her answer was much more about politics than melanin.

Now I'll never get in to the KKK.

I Do Not Think These tests are accurate

Submitted by TarGator on

I took an implicit attitude test and apparently am a racist and prefer Bush to FDR. Neither of those results do I think are accurate.

Oh come on

Submitted by James on

Any winger will tell you that wingers aren't racists. Just ask 'em.

Wikipedia sez

Submitted by Lance on

You may be right. The IA crowd would say that IAs are often at odds with rational/conscious beliefs. What follows is from this Wikipedia article:

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an experimental methodology within the discipline of social psychology designed to measure the strength of association between mental representations of objects in memory. The IAT requires the rapid categorization of various stimulus objects, such that easier pairings (and faster responses) are interpreted as being more strongly associated in memory than more difficult pairings (slower responses).

The IAT is a tool in the development of theories of Implicit Social Cognition, a body of results that suggest that many cognitive processes that affect behavior are unconscious in nature and are inaccessible to observation by the actor. These implicit processes affect perception, influence behavior, and color interpretation of past events. To date, however, the evidence that the IAT itself predicts behavior is mixed, with some studies suggesting IAT-behavior relations and some suggesting no such relations.

The IAT has been used to measure attitudes toward objects in the environment, self-esteem, self-identity, and stereotypes. In applied settings, the IAT has been used in the domains of marketing and industrial psychology. Recently, the IAT has been used in conjunction with imaging (fMRI) studies of brain activity.

I'm neutral...how boring

Submitted by Betsy Muse on

I showed little or no automatic preference. Even the walls in my house are beige. Not that I wanted to be labeled a racist or anything......

I was actually surprised since I was in school when things were violent during desegregation/busing. I was attacked a few times and was sent to private school to get away from the violence. I have worked hard to overcome any prejudices that might be hiding under the surface. Maybe it worked, or maybe I just got really good at hiding it.



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