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Are you prejudiced? Take the implicit association test

This article is more than 15 years old

It is an uncomfortable thing to admit, but according to statistics from the Implicit Association Test (IAT), very few of us are totally without prejudice of one form or another. Project Implicit is a long-term research project based at Harvard University that aims to measure people's preferences for certain social groups over others.

It can be difficult to determine whether someone feels prejudiced against another person - not only are we good at masking our true feelings, we may not even be aware what they are. In order to discover what we might be hiding, researchers at Harvard devised a form of questionnaire that measures the associations we make between "good" and "bad", "black" and "white", "gay" and "straight", and so on.

Participants are given two sets of images and two lists of words: one with positive associations ("happy", "love"); the other with negative ("tragedy", "agony"). The images and words are set to flash up at random on a computer screen, and participants make their selections when the words flash up at the same time as one of the sets of images. Their response times are recorded. The images will be either of black or white people, male or female, young or old, depending on which bias researchers are testing.

The theory is that, depending on our prejudices, we will subconsciously make the link between "male" and "clever", or "young" and "beautiful".

When we are asked to make the link between a pair that goes against our implicit associations (for example "old" and "happy") it will take us fractionally longer to overcome our bias. The longer the time it takes to accept a pairing, the greater our bias.

More than 4.5 million people have taken some version of the test online, and the data collected so far indicates that the majority of us have a slight preference for our own race, and that more than 80% of us have a bias against the elderly.

Critics of the IAT argue that the test is a more accurate indicator of our familiarity with different social groups, rather than a measure of bias (we might take longer to associate "friendly" with "Asian" if we don't know anyone Asian), but the debate continues. You can take the test yourself at implicit.harvard.edu.

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