Hidden Attitudes

[crypticgirl]

I went to a conference today to give a presentation, for which I got... wait for it... a chopping board and a CD of Christmas carols. Not that neither present is appreciated, but they were kind of random even as far as speakers' gifts tend to go.

Someone at the conference was talking about the implicit predjudices we build up which give us negative impressions of other people. He pointed us all to the Implicit Association Test designed by Harvard and a couple of other universities to unveil some of those biases. It's not very accessible, but if you have some vision then the tests should be okay.

So far I've done three of the IATs, including:

Able-Disabled: Slight bias towards able bodied people
Sexual Preference: Neutral
Light Skin-Dark Skin: Moderate bias towards light skin

Don't know how accurate they've been able to make this, but it's really interesting nonetheless.

Comments

[crypticgirl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it interests me too. I actually started out as a psychology major at uni, and then realised that most of the content, while interesting, wasn't teaching me how to respond to actual people. So I switched to English Lit instead. :)

If I'd been willing to change universities I would have probably considered social work or psychotherapy, but I wasn't so I didn't.