Here is a link to the Project Implicit web site.* The site seeks to measure implicit biases that we may not even be aware of.
The book, Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People, explains the purpose of the Project Implicit website:
In Blindspot, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explore hidden biases that we all carry from a lifetime of experiences with social groups – age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, or nationality.
“Blindspot” is a metaphor to capture that portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. The authors use it to ask about the extent to which social groups – without our awareness or conscious control – shape our likes and dislikes, our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential.
In Blindspot, hidden biases are revealed through hands-on experience with the method that has revolutionized the way scientists are learning about the human mind and that gives us a glimpse into what lies within the metaphoric blindspot – the Implicit Association Test.
The title’s “good people” are the many people – the authors included – who strive to align their behavior with their good intentions. The aim of Blindspot is to explain the science in plain enough language to allow well-intentioned people to better achieve that alignment. Venturing into this book is an invitation to understand our own minds.
From the above website:
Preliminary Information
Whichever IAT you do, we will ask you (optionally) to report your attitudes toward or beliefs about these topics, and provide some general information about yourself. These demonstrations should be more valuable if you have also tried to describe your self-understanding of the characteristic that the IAT is designed to measure. Also, we would like to compare possible differences among groups in their IAT performance and opinions, at least among those who decide to participate.
Featured Task: Test your implicit preferences
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.
We will ask you (optionally) to report your attitudes toward or beliefs about these topics, and provide some general information about yourself. These demonstrations should be more valuable if you have also tried to describe your self-understanding of the characteristic that the IAT is designed to measure. Also, a variety of factors may influence your IAT performance. The score is provided for entertainment purposes only.
Preliminary Information On The Mental Health Tests
In each task, we ask you to report your attitudes toward or beliefs about various mental health topics, and to provide some general information about yourself, including basic demographic information (e.g., your age) and your experience with different mental health issues (e.g., sadness or anxiety). These demonstrations may be more valuable if you report your conscious beliefs for comparison. Also, we compare responses across different groups, such as between men and women or persons with versus without different clinical symptoms. So, providing this information is useful for us.
Data exchanged with this site are protected by SSL encryption, and no personally identifying information is collected. IP addresses are routinely recorded, but are completely confidential.
Take A Test
[The above link is to 13 different tests that you can use to determine implicit (perhaps unrecognized) assumptions about different groups.]
*I found this resource while reviewing the outstanding lecture, Medical Decision Making In Pediatric Medicine: How You Reason Reduces Errors, by Dr. Kathy Shaw. Her lecture is one of a series of pediatric lectures available on the CHOP Open-access Medical Education web page. CHOP stands for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
