Are you cocky about how color blind you are? Do you love fat people as much as you love skinny people? Do you think women and men are equal? Please, take these tests. But I warn you, they’re not for the weak—you have to brace yourself for some ugly truths.
The tests can be accessed on the Project Implicit Web site, and I highly recommend you do it. Project Implicit, run by researchers at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington, uses the Implicit Association Test, which is a method that “demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods.”
I’d taken a test to find out whether I subconsciously preferred white people to African Americans, and the results showed I had no preference between the two groups. Feeling victorious, I then took a test to see whether it is easier for me to associate negative words with images of skinny people or with images of fat people—again, the results showed I have no underlying prejudice.
I bragged about my results to my husband, who had just taken a test that revealed he had a strong tendency to associate men with careers and women with family. He’d also taken a racial preference test, and the results showed he has a strong preference for African Americans (though he is white, he did spend more than two and a half years in Africa working for the U.S. Peace Corps). My five-foot, ten-inch Democratic husband also apparently does not like Hillary Clinton—at all—and strongly prefers short men to tall men.
Then I dove into my next task: a test to see whether I discriminate, unknowingly, against old people. I said out loud, “I bet I’ll like old people better. I think they’re cute and sweet.” But as soon as I started, it was shockingly hard for me to associate words like “joy,” “love” and “peace” with the old faces flashing on my screen, and shockingly easy for me to categorize words like “agony,” “terrible” and “horrible” with the wrinkly, saggy souls.
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