I’ve been working on some plans to improve our Diversity & Inclusion at my company and as part of this renewed research, I came across Project Implicit. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about this organization and assessment, it’s been popping in books or podcasts for years, but as I was putting it on my list of potential tools to use at work I figured I should take the assessment myself.
Project Implicit is a non-profit with the goal of educating people about hidden biases. It’s been an international collaboration between researchers started in 1998. They created an assessment that helps identity biases people may not know about. According to them: “The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures attitudes and beliefs that people may be unwilling or unable to report. The IAT may be especially interesting if it shows that you have an implicit attitude that you did not know about. For example, you may believe that women and men should be equally associated with science, but your automatic associations could show that you (like many others) associate men with science more than you associate women with science.”
They have free assessments for categories from gender, disability, transgender, age, religion, etc. That one I heard about most, and the one I took this evening, was for implicit bias on race.
I have to admit I was nervous to do it and fully expected I would end up with the slightly or moderate automatic preference for whites over blacks result, but I ended up neutral (showing no particular automatic preference for either).
The assessment shows you black and white people’s faces and does a few variations of good and bad word associations. You’re supposed to take it as quickly as you can to show what your automatic reactions are. I was fully prepared to write this blog post about my implicit bias favoring white people and I know I still have plenty of biases that I am trying to bring to the light that one assessment won’t uncover.
The assessment will show you other people’s results once you’ve finished and 68% of respondents show a slightly to a strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American. 18% remain neutral (little to no automatic preference), and just 14% of people showed any automatic preference to African Americans.
I think I’m going to work my way through each assessment category (they only take 10 minutes to complete). When you know better you can do better, but you have to know better first. We all have blind spots.
With Love,
Natalie