Blog Post #4

For this blog post, I read the article “What? Me Biased?” The article was written about a year ago before the 2008 Presidential Elections. Researchers used an implicit association test (IAT) to measure whether people regarded one candidate to be more “foreign” or “American” than others. When the participants where primed to think of either race, age, or gender they would think differently of a candidate as opposed to just responding naturally. (For example if they were focusing on age they might subconsciously see John McCain as less American than Barack Obama).

What surprised me most in the article was that most people in the study, regardless of race or ethnicity, view Americans as white. The example in the article of Lucy Liu v. Kate Winslet makes sense. If you didn’t follow pop culture too closely or know anything about either women you would probably assume Winslet was American and Liu was Chinese, but the truth is that Winslet is British and Liu is Asian-American. And when it was between Barack Obama and John McCain both were view as equally American when the participants were told to consider political parties and age, but when it came to skin color Barack was perceived as less American.

I think this study was very interesting because a lot of people who say they believe in equality might be subconsciously biased towards. I couldn’t think of a lot of ways that this research is relevant to my life, and I also don’t think I can agree with the research. After taking an IAT test about religion, I feel like the testing method really says nothing about my subconscious beliefs. The results of my religion IAT showed that I don’t favor any particular region or disfavor them. I perceive them all equally, with exception of Islam. Apparently I view Islam more negatively, which is not true at all. The test tells you to press a certain key for good words (superb, wonderful, good, great, etc.) and another key for bad words (terrible, awful, horrible, etc.). Then it tells you to keep pressing the same key for good words and for words that relate to a certain religion, and mark everything else the same as you would for bad words. The reason why I perceived Islam more negatively is because I pushed the key too hard and ended up marking my answer wrong. Of course, I could be an exception to this rule, but I’m still pretty skeptical about the accuracy of this kind of research.