That was one of some very profound things said by William James, not bad for an American - oops, I did it again, my prejudice is coming out.
Yep, that's right, I'm admitting to being prejudiced.
SHOCK GASP HORROR!!!Well at least I'm honest! And you know what, I bet you are too.
BOO HISS OUTRAGE!!!
Easy now, calm down, I think I'd better explain!
I wasn't prejudiced yesterday, nor even this morning for that matter. I am now because I took an IAT test.
A what?
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an experimental method within social psychology designed to measure the strength of automatic association between mental representations of objects/concepts in memory. The IAT requires the rapid categorisation of various stimulus objects , such that easier pairings (and faster repsonses) are interpreted as being more strongly associated in memory than more difficult pairings (slower responses).
That's right, bow down before your intellectual superior, can you construct a sentence like that?!
OK OK, you can get up off your knees now, I pinched that from Wikipedia!
This is the theory in English. You place a list of words and pictures in either the left or the right hand column as they appear on the screen. The words relate to either positive or negative emotions. The pictures are of either black or white people. Whether the words go with the black or the white people changes through the test, but how quickly you categorise, determines how (if at all) prejudiced you are!
Fiendishly clever and in my case, downright annoying!
In reality, this measures your subconscious thinking, but of course (well, hopefully), your consciousness keeps a tab on your actual behaviour... usually!
Take the test for yourself, it'd be great if you could comment what your result was...
PROJECT IMPLICIT - THE TEST and click on the 'demonstration' tab.
