Atheology

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. —Jonathan Swift

Implicit Associations Testing May 25, 2006

Posted by Rastaban in : Atheist Culture, Ethics & Morality , trackback

We are often unaware of the implicit associations or unconscious biases we carry around. Scientists Mahzarin Banaji, Tony Greenwald & Brian Nosek believe they may have found a test for identifying such implicit biases.

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.”

You can take their tests here (if you dare). If interested, you can also volunteer to take part in Project Implicit.