Project Implicit

This is a research project that has been around for a while. The purpose is to try to study people’s implicit bias on various topics (race, religion, age, sexuality, etc.) in a truly scientific manner. It’s quite interesting.

The methodology is fairly simple. Say you are doing the straight-gay bias test. First the screen will have straight on the left, with you pressing the E button and gay on the right with you pressing I. An image or word will appear (two women together or the word heterosexual) and you have to press the appropriate button. Pretty simple.

They will mix it up left and right to make sure there’s no random bias due to being right handed or left handed.

Then it gets more interesting. On the left will be “straight or good” and on the right will be “gay or bad”. So if the picture is of a man and a woman you press E (left) and if the word is “horrible” you have to press I (right).

Then they’ll switch it to “straight or bad” and “gay or good”.

What it ultimately tests is whether you have a hard time associating “good” and “gay” together (or vise versa). They record how quickly you can complete the tasks and how many mistakes you make. If it takes you a lot longer to do the “gay or good” test, the conclusion is that you have a harder time associating the two concepts and therefore you have an implicit bias towards straight people.

I’ve tried two of the tests. I consider myself a liberal person with few biases. But when I took the black/white test the results indicated that I had a strong bias. And while I don’t like to admit it, I have to be honest, “white or good” did seem to be the easier part of the test. I’d like to think I’m not biased but I grew up in a 95% white neighborhood so I probably am.

Interestingly the straight-gay test indicated that I had a very slight bias towards gay people. In this test I actually found that the old definition of gay as “happy” made the “gay or good” association easy in the test. Though I have to be honest. When I’m reading an old fairy tale to my daughter that describes a prince as feeling gay, I do stumble a bit…

I guess the truth is we all have biases.