A Test For Your Unconscious- How Do You See Black and White?

Does your unconscious mind see everyone equally? Take the Implicit Association Test and see what your mind is up to. Photo on Flickr by blmurch.

I love to travel. Fortunately I have the resources to travel. I love to travel, I love to learn about other cultures, and learning Mandarin was one of the best things I did in college.

I love these things because I love being taken out of my comfort zone. Being immersed with others can change your perceptions for the better and help eliminate personal prejudices/stereotypes. I consider myself to be relatively unbiased, or at least I strive to be… but am I?

Today I took the Implicit Association Test, part of Project Implicit maintained by Harvard, University of Washington, and University of Virginia. According to the website “the IAT was originally developed as a device for exploring the unconscious roots of thinking and feeling.” Many of the quizzes are devoted to uncovering racial biases.

You can take the “Race IAT” quiz here.

What does this have to do with public health?

A developing field in public health is how racism and perceptions of discrimination can affect health. The hypothesis is those who perceive they are being discriminated against will be more likely to have negative health outcomes, such as increased incidence of heart attack, diabetes, and hypertension. Increased stress levels may be to blame.

The literature is scattered. Some show an association, some do not. Research is further complicated by the difficulty of measuring both levels of discrimination and specific health outcomes. Of course people in the US are not just black/white, but many shades in between. Unfortunately our culture still puts people in one box or the other.

I’ve had people tell me racism and discrimination are no longer a part of US culture. I won’t go into that here. Recent polls show the imbalance of how discrimination is perceived between groups.

“According to a 2003 Gallup poll, two in five of blacks said that they felt discriminated against at least once a month, and one in five felt discriminated against every day. But, a CNN poll from last January found that 72 percent of whites thought that blacks overestimated the amount of discrimination against them, while 82 percent of blacks thought that whites underestimated the amount of discrimination against blacks.”

~excerpt from Charle’s Blow’s Op-Ed in the New York Times

I took the quiz. It took about 10 minutes. Can’t say I was pleased with the results. However, it was eye opening, interesting, and I realize I have more work to do. While taking the quiz I constantly felt the tug of bias drilled into me by the media.

I also thought about how Obama has helped slightly turn the tide. Instead of African American faces being tied to negativity, Obama provided a fresh breath of air by associating color with words such as: hope, inspiration, entrepreneurial, motivated, and successful.

For More Information:

Want another source for quizzes? Go here.

Understanding Prejudice, funded by the National Science Foundation

Charles Blow’s blog, By the Numbers is posted here.