Do you know your mind?

I am about halfway through the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.  It’s about our sense of judgement and decision making processes.  He mentions an on-going study by Harvard University, Project Implicit, that analyzes people’s implicit associations, the snap judgements people make that they may not even realize.  I think the first test was for race, but now there are several (gender-science, weight, religion, age).

“It is well known that people don’t always ’speak their minds’, and it is suspected that people don’t always ‘know their minds’. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.”

I started with the Light Skin / Dark Skin IAT.  “Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic preference may be described as ’slight’, ‘moderate’, ’strong’, or ‘little to no preference’.”  My results …

Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for Light Skin compared to Dark Skin.

While I find this information annoying I’m not really surprised.  One passage in Blink says, “The disturbing thing about the test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values.  As it turns out, for example, of the fifty thousand African Americans who have taken the Race IAT so far, about half of them, like me, have stronger associations with whites than blacks.  How could we not?  We live in North America, where we are surrounded ever day by cultural messages linking white with good.”  Oh good – I can blame the media.

There’s good news though.  I also took the Sexuality IAT.  My results were similar to 3% of the population.

Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Gay People compared to Straight People.

If 10% of the population is gay then I actually like gay people more than most gay people do. 

Me and Kathy Griffin, we just love the gays.