What's Your Automatic Bias?

A friend of my mine posted today on Facebook something called "Project Implicit" a Harvard research project that studies where our automatic bias lies. These automatic biases are generally based on things like upbringing, social/cultural conditioning and level of exposure to different groups of people.

I did nearly all of the available tests. While they are geared towards Americans, being from Canada, I had no trouble with the tests aside from the one about US Presidents (it's hard to have bias when you don't know a whole lot about US presidents, ha ha!)

I was surprised to see where my own automatic biases lie, and I'm hoping it will help me be more mindful of them. I think it's important for a Jedi to be mindful of where their automatic biases are, so that we can ensure that they don't affect our actions/decisions.

Here is the webpage if your want to take the tests yourself:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

And here are my results, if you're interested:

Wow, that was interesting. The four tests I was most drawn to were the Weapons, Weight, Sexuality, and Gender-Career. The results weren't surprising for the most part (no preference, slight thin preference, moderate gay preference, no preference). I guess it felt good that I was able to almost perfectly guess what my bias was for each. The one exception was I thought I would have no preference in the straight/gay test. Either way, I enjoyed it

I though this might be an interesting idea, but then the test tried to make me say that Coca Cola or Mobile Phones were "harmless" so I threw my computer through the window.


Ah well.

Wow, apparently I'm a white non-racist liberal mild bigot who strongly associates weapons with white people, moderately associates career and males.

Funny , none of the few first questions was my... True answer avalible . Hmm a test with a direction and wished result. My answer and test were invalid I had to many not... Answered . Thanks for this , I think lol . I'm sure the answers we get are then guided . Fun ! I have the same effect on Puzzels and codes. Be well all!

Rex Peter I dare you to take it again and post your result . !

Well, here goes:

- a moderate automatic preference for Young people over Old people

- a moderate preference of other people over muslims

- a strong automatic association for Harmless Objects with Black Americans and Weapons with White Americans.

- moderate automatic preference of straight people over gay people

- male with career and female with family

- Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Barack Obama over George W. Bush.


The last one doesn't surprise me - the rest has been quite an eye-opener. I consider myself an advocate for gender equality and against any kind of discrimination - yet I do seem to have some ingrained biases that I need to work on in some way

I only took two, the weapons one and the skin tone one, and I do not have an Automatic bias in either case. Although it was tough to say what was a harmless item. I could easily use any of those items as a weapon.

I enjoyed taking the two tests that I did and might come back later to take more. Thanks Leah.

There are so many to take, so I stopped there. Due to this being based on timing of response, it's not overly accurate. I say this because of how tricky it is to quickly switch each group to the opposite fingers and expect it to stick very well. I made a lot of errors due to my prior association with each group of terms with one letter. After the first one, I just started to slow down my responses and press each key based on a steady rhythm.

I found this interesting enough that I am going to go through and start taking them and record them in my journal. So far I have done 4 and I am finding it somewhat countering itself but I will complete them all then base my opinion of the study from there.