Harvard has made available online a
whole slew of tests which can measure implicit attitudes such as stereotypes, prejudice or racist attitudes. Harvard's version is a web version of a similar laboratory test used by social psychology researchers around the world known as Implicit Association Tests (IAT).
Take the Race IAT and respond in the poll below. The test takes about 2-5 minutes, requires Flash and requires you answer as quickly as possible.
What exactly is an IAT? Read on to find out.
Wikipedia has the answer:
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an experimental methodology within the discipline of social psychology designed the 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.
The IAT has been successfully 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.
When applied to stereotypes relating to race, it has the ability to detect preference in a scientific manner. Statistically speaking, it reveals that most Americans have an automatic preference for white over brown. Well duh you say, but there's more--it really is a very high percentage, including a whole lot of self-described liberals, and even many racial minorities themselves.
If you take the Race test, you may find out that you have an implicit attitude you do not like. I know I did, with multiple test retakes. What do you do about it? Harvard's FAQ has a solution:
Answer: First, bear in mind that these website IAT tests are not perfectly accurate. You may want to repeat the test before drawing even a tentative conclusion of this sort. On the other hand, it is very possible to possess an automatic preference that you would rather not have (and the researchers who developed this test are convinced that they, too, fall into this category). One solution is to seek experiences that could undo or reverse the patterns of experience that could have created the unwanted preference. But this is not always easy to do. A more practical alternative may be to remain alert to the existence of the undesired preference, recognizing that it may intrude in unwanted fashion into your judgments and actions. Additionally, you may decide to embark on consciously planned actions that can compensate for known unconscious preferences and beliefs.
In short, we must take affirmative action to prevent these automatic preferences from intruding in our judgments.