As my family and I were driving back from Michigan this weekend, I borrowed/stole my brother's book, Blink by Macolm Gladwell. Gladwell's mother is black, and father is white. Gladwell metioned taking a test from Harvard known as the IAT, or the Implicit Association Test. The whole point is to determine how you make connections, and why.
Here's the link for the test.
If the link doesn't work, click on their link for the homepage and click on demonstrations. Or, you can sign up for the test
If you click on the "Take a Demo Test" it will give you several options. The book deals with the Skin Tone IAT, about six or seven from the top.
Please take it, and post comments about either the skin color or other demos.
The IAT in the book is Work/Family, where you the catergories are female/male names and either words relating to work (corporation, executive) or family (cousin, domestic).
Though of course we'd all like to think of ourselves as color-blind, this test really surprised me. Don't feel obligated to post what your results were, but, having grown up on the North Shore, I did not find it surprising that my results came back as a moderate automatic preference for light-skin compared to dark skin.
How much of this is conscious? And is that a question anyone can ever answer? Also, in what ways might this test not completely identify our subconcious?
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I really like this post. I've heard of Blink, it covers a really interesting topic. I think the IAT test connected to your link is really impressive and accurate. Because you don't know exactly how your results will be analyzed there is no way of submiting untruthful answers. Like you said, we'd all like to think of ourselves as color-blind. Were the IAT a simple question-answer test, alot of people would be inclined to answer falsely to protect their feelings.
ReplyDeleteAlso, just a note on the IAT-- if you take the religion one, as I am doing now (it's today's feature), one of the questions is: Do you think your country's government has gone too far, has been about right, or has not gone far enough, in restricting people's civil liberties in order to fight terrorism?
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