http://implicit.harvard.edu/
Is a place you can read about and participate in this research. Basically these researchers believe they have found a way to measure bias on a variety of ideas - in particular race, gender, policitcal affilication, etc. Topics that people may think they feel one way about but the study methods indicate that their actual feelings could be very different.
Take the test...see how you do compared to how youGrowing up in India, Banaji had studied psychophysics, the psychological representation of physical objects: A 20-watt bulb may be twice as bright as a 10-watt bulb, for example, but if the two bulbs are next to each another, a person may guess the difference is only 5 watts. Banaji enjoyed the precision of the field, but she realized that she found people and their behavior toward one another much more interesting. The problem was that there was no accurate way to gauge people's attitudes. You had to trust what they told you, and when it came to things such as prejudice -- say, against blacks or poor people -- people usually gave politically correct answers. It wasn't just that people lied to psychologists -- when it came to certain sensitive topics, they often lied to themselves. Banaji began to wonder: Was it possible to create something that could divine what people really felt -- even if they weren't aware of it themselves?
The results of one of Banaji's experiments as a young scholar at Yale University encouraged her. She and her colleagues replicated a well-known experiment devised by psychologist Larry Jacoby. Volunteers were first shown a list of unfamiliar names such as Sebastian Weisdorf. The volunteers later picked out that name when asked to identify famous people from a list of famous and unknown names. Because they had become familiar with the name, people mistakenly assumed Sebastian Weisdorf was a famous man. The experiment showed how subtle cues can cause errors without people's awareness.
Banaji and her colleagues came up with a twist. Instead of Sebastian Weisdorf, they asked, what if the name was Sally Weisdorf? It turned out that female names were less likely to elicit the false-fame error; volunteers did not say Sally Weisdorf was a famous woman. Women, it appeared, had to be more than familiar to be considered famous. Banaji had stumbled on an indirect measure of gender bias.
She began scouting for other techniques. In 1994, Anthony Greenwald, Banaji's PhD adviser and later her collaborator, came up with a breakthrough. Working out of the University of Washington, Greenwald drew up a list of 25 insect names such as wasp, cricket and cockroach, 25 flower names such as rose, tulip and daffodil, and a list of pleasant and unpleasant words. Given a random list of these words and told to sort them into the four groups, it was very easy to put each word in the right category. It was just as easy when insects were grouped with unpleasant words and flowers were grouped with pleasant words.
But when insects were grouped with pleasant words, and flowers with unpleasant words, the task became unexpectedly difficult. It was harder to hold a mental association of insects with words such as "dream," "candy" and "heaven," and flowers with words such as "evil," "poison" and "devil." It took longer to complete the task.
Psychologists have long used time differences to measure the relative difficulty of tasks. The new test produced astonishing results. Greenwald took the next step: Instead of insects and flowers, he used stereotypically white-sounding names such as Adam and Chip and black-sounding names such as Alonzo and Jamel and grouped them with the pleasant and unpleasant words. He ran the test on himself.
"I don't know whether to tell you I was elated or depressed," he says. "It was as if African American names were insect names and European American names were flower names. I had as much trouble pairing African American names with pleasant words as I did insect names with pleasant words."
Greenwald sent Banaji the computer test. She quickly discovered that her results were similar to his. Incredulous, she reversed the order of the names in the test. She switched the left and right keys. The answer wouldn't budge.
"I was deeply embarrassed," she recalls. "I was humbled in a way that few experiences in my life have humbled me."
think you'll do.
