I’m criticizing the test. I don’t see that you have any grounds for criticizing me so I’ll ignore such attempts from now on.
In any event, the result I got didn’t surprise me in the least. I just consider it useless, at least at this superficial level. I suppose if I sat down for an entire afternoon and took a whole battery of psych tests… I’d still turn out to be an okay guy. 
Criticizing a piece of peer reviewed scientific work needs to be more than denial or nit picking. To have got to the stage that it has, means that the research has already been heavily critiqued, and so any major problems will probably have already been detected by people better than us.
What remains to be explained is why the vast majority of the tests show an inbuilt association for a majority of people between ‘white faces’ and ‘good concepts’ and ‘black faces’ and ‘bad concepts’. That this is the case cannot be denied. The question is ‘Why is this happening?’
Now I do find it quite uncomfortable that I repeatedly score moderately adversely towards black faces in this teat, but measured against my actual social practice, this does not seem to show. People who know me assume that I am automatically biased towards people of color. What I don’t know is how such atavistic or socially conditioned negativity about ‘black faces’ either turns into or does not turn into racist behaviour.
Perhaps the OP could summarize any published data which purportedly demonstrate that persons scoring “correctly” on this test are significantly more likely to make non-racist decisions in hiring, granting mortgage loans and selling or renting housing - not to mention having “many” friends of non-WASP origin. 
Oh.
Does it?
Such conclusions are specifically rejected by this group of researchers. They are merely looking at the channelling of information and are primarily experimental psychologists. Any such research looking at real world decisions would need to be carried out by sociologists or Social psychologists with experience of such methods.
I am in no way supporting this research as being a valid measure of actual behaviour- that is why I quoted my own social experience against what the test implies.
Undeniably it is the case that a very large number of people associate white faces with good and black faces with bad. That needs explaining.
[ignore]ignorant snarks[/ignore]
I (being very white) got “A slight automatic preference” for black over white.
On the age one I got a neutral result. shrug
Couldn’t recall. Just did it. “Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Old and Young.”
In other words, to this point all we have is meaningless data-shuffling.
Or we could interpret the sharing of your “social experience” (championing of the underdog, well-read-ness, bevy of non-WASP friends etc.) as an indication that if a multiculturalist like you could harbor such hidden racism, what must that say for the rest of us poor ignorant slobs who lack such credentials?
The reality is that virtually all of us, minority or non-minority, harbor at least some racist feelings or preconceptions.
Actions speak much more authoritatively than flash card test scores.
I didn’t take it. I don’t need to. I know I’m not immune to biggotism. I don’t like it but you can’t live in the world and not start to make judgments based on cultural observations.
As an additional thought, it occurs to me that “black” and “bad” happening to start with the same letter could cause errors that have nothing to do with racism. As in the card example mentioned above, it’s easy to group hearts and diamonds because they both happen to be red. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the matching letter “b” in “black” and “bad” led to errors or momentary hesitations biasing the results in that direction. Like spoonerisms, the symptom may be simple momentary neurological confusion rather than underlying bigotry. Unless the test can correct for malapropisms, I wouldn’t consider it a useful measure of anything but the most extreme cases, i.e. people for whom “black=left” and “good=left” implies (to them) the contradiction “black=good”. Similarly, an I.Q. test may be useful for identifying people who are very bright or very dull, but the difference between a score of 95 and one of 105 could be one incorrect answer on one ambiguous question, or just someone who knew the answer was “b” but accidentally filled in the box for “c”. A Klansman or NOI member might have a bias so strong it overrides simple error. The middle ground, though, is a grayish mass where the difference between someone who is slightly biased white and someone who is slightly biased black could be just one or two mispressed keys.
As an alternate protocol, I can imagine instead of “good” and “bad”, a series of shapes is presented to the person being tested, with him asked to rank them according to personal preference. At the end, instead using the labels “good” and “bad”, use the shape that ranked highest (i.e. the one the person being tested considers the most favoured) and lowest (the least favoured) as the standards, reducing chance of linguistic confusion.
At the very least, I’m curious if people who are good typists score more consistently than people who have little or no typing experience.
I think they need to add another category when they ask for personal details.
Handedness, and the predominance of that handedness. It is my understanding that left-handed people are different than right-handed people, and I’m not talking the obvious. Left-handed brains are wired differently than right-handed brains. Lefties process and interpret information differently. While Wkipedia shouldn’t be taken as gospel, it does illustrate some of these differences.
Yeah, I’m left-handed.
Huh. Me, too.
Maybe that means something.
Okay, I know that no one wants to talk about the actual OP, and would rather talk about testing methods, I’ve got some thoughts on the OP, so I’m gonna regurgitate 'em here.
Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes.
Doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes.
You know what annoys me? When I say something like that and some self-righteous jerk in the discussion says, “Well not me! I’m not racist. You probably are, since you’re accusing me. Racist.”
I’m sorry, but in this day and age, everyone’s a little bit racist (speaking from my experience living in the US and some travel in Europe and the middle east). And no, I don’t mean racism as in klan membership. Racism as in pre-concieved ideas based on race/other factors (so that includes the other -isms too).
Do I see a black man and, from somewhere in the dark corners of my subconsciousness, come up with the assumption that he can jump higher than I? I’m afraid so. Do I acutally put any stock on this assumption, or act on it? Of course not. But it’s there.
I challenge anyone who thinks that s/he isn’t racist: do you notice race? Why? Why would you devote brain cells to such categories? Are you sure that person over there is “black”? Couldn’t she just be white with a dark complexion?
Someday, let’s hope, our great-great whateverchildren will devote no more neural energy to classifications of race than they do to classifications of left/right-handedness. But that day is a long ways off. (In this country, at least.)
There. now anyone wanna talk about racism? Or Avenue Q?
This “test” has been posted before, with pretty much the same ensuing conversation.
It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now.
This is Great Debates, not “In my not so humble opinion.” This is published peer-reviewed research that shows what it shows- there is an innate bias in a majority of society to relate black face photographs with bad and white face photographs with good.
So far, not bullshit!
Does it generalize to society- we don’t know- further research would be necessary using tests of people’s admitted racial preferences.
Does it raise questions about deep seated prejudice- yes it does.
As for your call of bullshit- this is GD, therefore: cite? Please cite contravening research from a peer researched areticlew, or start a ne 'Racism Test is Bullshit" in IMHO.
Glad to see someone answering the OP and not arguing around the subject looking for loopholes.
Well, aside from the link, the OP was about Pjen’s test results and his resulting discomfort and such, which is all specific to him and no-one else, followed by “…lets debate what this means for prejudice and possible (unconscious) bigotry.” A valid aspect of such debate is questioning if the test means anything at all. One may take a test and assume it’ll either prove Result A or Result B, but it is also worth examining if the test isn’t sufficient to prove A or B. From the FAQ on that website:
Somewhere along the way, the test designer had to make an arbitrary decision on how fast “faster” should be. Is responding to a flower picture in 1 second fast enough, or does it show hesitation? How about half a second? A quarter of a second? The shorter this interval (and as I’ve said, the test do ask that you go as fast as possible), the greater the chance of error, because you may miss the the arbitrarily small response time the tester decided was fast enough. You could be a racist, or you could just have been momentarily distracted by something and forgot if “good” was on the left or right.
In any case, a statement that people gravitate toward people that resemble the people that person has been surrounded with since childhood (including television and film images)? That’s not exactly a huge insight.
In the meantime, if everybody is a bit racist, then the term “racist” loses pretty much all of its bite, doesn’t it? We’d have to add qualifiers or make up a new term, like "Everybody’s racist, but the Klan guys? They’re *really racist! They’re mega-racist. They’re sur-racist. They’re plu-racist. They’re so racist, they’re racist against other racists (which means everybody, since everybody’s racist)!
Fretting about it, in any event, is a bit silly. Just treat people with civility and don’t sweat the test.
What’s Avenue Q, by the way?
I took the test yesterday and then again today. The first time I got a slight preference for white people, and thought the test was biased because it paired white and good first, then switched halfway through.
The second time it paired black and good first, and sure enough I got a slight preference for black people.
I still don’t see what the point of the test is though. It doesn’t take into account why people might associate words like “happy” with white people easier than with black. If you believe that white people have an advantage in society due to institutional racism, then you might well associate “happy” with them rather than with black people, who are the ones being hurt by racism.
Because of this, it is even conceivable that the more sensitive you are to racism, the greater preference for white people the test would consider you to have. Getting a preference for black people on the test might mean that you are oblivious to racism, and are really part of the problem yourself.
Count me as a racist if this qualifies:
African American with pants below hips: criminal (or criminal wannabe)
Black with a lab coat and a french accent: Intelligent graduate student from Africa
Asian with red hair: rich daddy’s boy/girl burning time and money
Asian with a shop: works 12 hours a day for his family
White listening to rap and dragging pants: crack head, Jerry Springer reject white trash
White sitting in a library: trying to do well in school
There are cultures I am strongly predisposed against. Some of this cultures happen to be more often associated with a particular ethnicity but not exclusively so. My dislikes for these cultures doesn’t mean a dislike for their most common ethnicity.
The whole Jerry Springer wannabe culture, I despise with all my heart. Their cultured welfare dependence, their disregard for public property and modesty.
The whole hip-hop I want to be a bling-blingy crack thug look. Disgusting. Profane language in public places, loud talking, the world is my living room attitude.
Back leather jacket, red hair, never brushed teeth Asians who think they can stomp all over the place because they have dollars in their pockets. Think a millenary building is just another disposable plastic Disney attraction they can climb on.
All ethnicities, from White to Latino have asocial subcultures whose members you can spot from two city blocks away. What makes them wrong are personal decisions. If they think I hate them because of their ethnicity, they are the ones being racist.
That said, even within those subcultures, there are members with more wholesome attitudes and characters who just do what they do out of habit and know enough to try to correct their lives. My job forces me into contact with them and allows me to find these gems on the rough. A valuable thing to keep in mind when judging a person by its looks.
ADDED: oh, and that test if bull. Even if I “passed” it
I am interested in what part of the test you think is ‘bull’ and why you think that.
I am also interested in what you think the research claims to show.