Starting in the mid-1990s, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald conducted a series of tests to determine if an individual's unconscious (or implicit) attitudes could be measured. Implicit attitudes are unconscious positive or negative evaluations towards objects, people, and/or groups that can have measurable effects on people's perceptions and/or behaviors. Banaji and Greenwald created a computer program that measures response times to positive and negative words with various cultural attributes. Eric Kandel, a Columbia University neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner, once noted that between 80 to 90 percent of the mind works unconsciously. As such, an individual's implicit associations (IA) are often completely blind to us.
1. Start by going to the Implicit Associations (IA) website.
2. Once on the website, you can either register to see how your implicit associations continue across different measures or you can simply click in as a guest.
3. On the next page, you'll find more information about the IA test and a disclaimer.
4. Go ahead and click "I wish to proceed."
5. On the next page, you'll find over ten different IA tests that have been utilized in research.
6. Select one of the ones that examines cultural IAs ( ***disability is the one the I choose*****)
After completing the IA test, ****please answer the following questions******.
Please note that you do not need to provide information about which test you took unless you are comfortable doing so.
1. Public intellectual Malcolm Gladwell discussed taking the IA Race Test with Oprah Winfrey. As a biracial individual (his father is White and his mother is Jamaican), he was shocked to find that he was positively biased towards White people. Just to make sure the outcome was correct, he took the test multiple times and got the the same results.
He ultimately described his experience as a "creepy, dispiriting, devastating moment." Why do you think people are shocked by their outcomes on the IA Tests?
2. Were you surprised by your implicit associations outcome?
3. How do you think your hidden biases affect how you view and interact with people from different cultures?