Monday, January 24, 2005
How To Waste An Hour
Are you a bigot? Are you sure? You should take Havard's new Implicit Association Test, a test designed to measure unconscious biases towards certain groups. (The WaPo article is five pages long and will take 15-20 minutes to get all the way through it, but it's worth it.) The most interesting thing to me is that people who have spent their whole lives fighting for equality for one particular group or another tend to be just as biased against that particular group - i.e. the gay activists were stunned to realize that they had a negative bias towards homosexuals.
But that doesn't surprise me at all. The accepted wisdom in the Ivory Towers seems to be that the people who are most interested in fighting against certain prejudices are the ones who are hyper-aware of all the ways those preudices are expressed. People who don't associate with those groups just don't care. Example: I read a letter to the editor for TIME magazine about a month ago, and the person was all pissed off that TIME had apparently perpetuated some Polish stereotype. My first thought: Dude, get over yourself. My second thought: There's a Polish stereotype? (Does it involve sausage?) But if I walk into some networking event where I'm shilling for a job, I know in about 30 seconds how many women are in the room, and moreover, how many of those women are there for their job or for their husbands.
I had to get to the end of page 4 to get to the link to the test, so I'll save you the time: The Implicit Association Test from the Harvard website.
And no, I haven't taken it yet, though I plan to take it later today. I'm a little scared.
But that doesn't surprise me at all. The accepted wisdom in the Ivory Towers seems to be that the people who are most interested in fighting against certain prejudices are the ones who are hyper-aware of all the ways those preudices are expressed. People who don't associate with those groups just don't care. Example: I read a letter to the editor for TIME magazine about a month ago, and the person was all pissed off that TIME had apparently perpetuated some Polish stereotype. My first thought: Dude, get over yourself. My second thought: There's a Polish stereotype? (Does it involve sausage?) But if I walk into some networking event where I'm shilling for a job, I know in about 30 seconds how many women are in the room, and moreover, how many of those women are there for their job or for their husbands.
I had to get to the end of page 4 to get to the link to the test, so I'll save you the time: The Implicit Association Test from the Harvard website.
And no, I haven't taken it yet, though I plan to take it later today. I'm a little scared.
