Harvard Test
So in one of my classes, we were passed out an article that discussed this test.
Give it a shot and see how you like the answer.
www.implicit.harvard.edu
I scored with seventeen percent of America and have little to no automatic preference between black and white people.
Matt
Your mother, 2%: strong automatic preference for African
Americans. Huh?
Comment by anon — April 28, 2007 @ 6:55 pm
27%, moderate preference for EA. And now I can say/feel/ponder … what, exactly … ?
Comment by el Kib — April 28, 2007 @ 7:13 pm
So what if they substituted pinch hitters for races — say, kitchenware for EA, office supplies for AA (or whatever — just relatively non-associative objects). Then run the test with all the loaded adjectives and see if people lean towards one group of objects or the other. I found that my brain would just freeze now and again, which delay is being interpreted as related to the race at hand at any given moment and may merely be confusion due to pace, or even an anti-association. Seems likely to be somewhat twitch-sensitive, in other words.
Comment by adam — April 28, 2007 @ 7:18 pm
Your godmomma has a moderate automatic preference (4%) for African Americans over European Americans. Do you think the President’s ethnicity is skewing my results?
Comment by FierceBaby — April 28, 2007 @ 9:40 pm
Good God. Too hard for me to understand my results: 27, 27, 16,17,6,4,2
For me it was easier when the European Americans held the letter “e”. It’s what made sense mnemonically. So I must have scored higher on the second part of the test.
They should make the test with democrats and republicans.
Comment by Chris — April 28, 2007 @ 10:00 pm
I was hindered by knowing how this was supposed to work, but/and pleased to get a chance to “try” it. So thanks.
But I came out in the 27% that El Kib did. (I’m so jealous of anon.) It seemed “unfair” to me in that I got AA with negatives correspondence second, and I thought I had gotten better at it by then. (But I gather from the FAQs that if I had gotten the AA with negative correspondence FIRST, I probably also would have been moderately faster with it, and I would disbelieve the results with the excuse that I was slower with the AA with positives correspondence because I found it confusing having just done the other correspondence.) (Ouch, what a tangled sentence. Where’s Smiling Dan?)
One of the things that I found interesting was that on the very first round, I could feel that I was taking much longer to decide that a face was EA than that a face was AA. I kept expecting some trickier AA faces–but they all seemed obvious to me. I suspect that when you’re part of a group you see nuances in the group; I slowed down checking that the EA faces really fit.
Comment by jennifer — April 28, 2007 @ 10:47 pm
The same results as in high school. “Subject is of EA descent and a poor test taker.”
Comment by michael — April 29, 2007 @ 6:15 am
I’m sorry, but I just can’t handle taking tests anymore. I burned out on tests about 100 years ago in grad school.
Comment by rakkity — May 3, 2007 @ 1:44 am