In the USA it’s hard not to notice that there’s a correllation between peoples’ appearance and their behavior.
I expect that’s a pretty widespread phenomenon. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if many teenagers in Europe dress (or at least try to reasonably approximate) Americans or Africans or whatever seems fashionably exotic in their near-universal teenage rebellion phase. Their parents, natch, are annoyed, which is the whole point.
Why is this racist?
It is not necessarily racist, but as I said in the OP might be indicative of a tendency towards prejudice and possible (unconscious) bigotry. Now if that is interracial between white and black, it would be indicative of potential racist attitudes, however pre-conscious.
Let me make a fairer comment, I don’t think the test is a good tool to measure my implicit associations. My personal job history might have something to do with this. I have often had sorting jobs, I am not naturally good at them and I tend to be very meticulous about checking and double checking before slotting something.
I have taken several tests that show me as neutral even though I know I hold a bias. The few times I haven’t been scored neutral, have always shown me with a slight bias towards whatever the first association was it that was presented to me.
Suppose all of my friends were white (or black, or yellow, or whatever), and I only listened to white musicians, and only read books by white authors, and just basically, on a personal level, rejected any cultural association that was not white (or black, or yellow.) Would that be racist?
“Potential racist attitudes, however pre-conscious,” strikes me as a phrase so weak and ambiguous as to be meaningless.
The link to the test gives me an error message, so I have no what it purports to test.
The second post has a corrected link, or you could just go to https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.jsp
Halfway through the test it told me that ‘White’ and ‘Good’ went together, and ‘Black’ and ‘Bad’ went together. 
Really? Then why do you suppose so many unarmed black dudes end up getting accidentally shot? Do you think all those cops are unspeakably racist – or just working under unconscious cultural messages in the heat of the moment?
I felt that the test had more to do with your recognition of the faces than your feelings about them. I apparently have a very strong automatic preference for African Americans over European Americans. Now, I myself am so pale as to make milk look tan so this comes as a shock that I apparently dislike those who are similarly colored to myself.
It seems to me that it might be a better gauge of one’s feelings if the words were actually paired with faces, rather than simply being in the same category. If someone had an easier time placing white faces with the word “joy” under them than black faces with the word “happy” maybe it might be measuring something. But at no point did it feel like I was equating the qualities in those words with the pictures. It was just recognizing the ethnicity of the picture and remembering if it was left or right this time.
I’m trying to figure out what this means. Did you mean “millenery” building? Are Asians known for climbing on hat factorys? Are they climbing on military buildings? This is a stereotype I’ve never heard of.
I meant very old or ancient. Everytime I travel as a tourist, there is always some japanese kid that hands me his camera so I can take a picture of him and proceeds to climb on some monument that is clearly marked as off limits to strike his victory sign cool and spontaneous pose (that is always the same).
OK. I took the test. I have a slight preference for European-Americans vs. African-Americans. I have no idea what this means, but whatever it means, it says nothing about racism.
The test seemed pretty silly to me.
Cool, I learned a new word today: millenary.
And I learned millinery, which I think is, by far, more obscure. 
Why on earth did you know that word?
I still think the test is BS from the start, because associating words like “happy” and “joy” with white people easier than with black people has nothing to do with a “preference.”
If one thinks that black people are victims of racism, while white people get along much easier in life, then it would be natural to associate “happy” and “joy” with white people, rather than with black people who could hardly be happy about dealing with racism.
If they alternated pictures of criminals holding money, and victims lying bloody on the ground, I guarantee that most people would associate happy easier with the rich criminal than the bloody victim. Would that mean that people had a preference for criminals?
If you get a preference for black people on the test, like I did the second time, that might mean that you are oblivious to the challenges that racism poses to black people in America. It’s nothing to be proud of.
As yet another possible varitation on the test, picture this: it starts with
Good…Bad
Black…White
Then a word and a picture of a face are shown, with the testee instructed to click E if the pairing is “correct” or I if it is “incorrect”. By this criteria:
black face/“joy” is correct
black face/“abuse” is incorrect
white face/“joy” is incorrect
white face/“abuse” is incorrect
The idea being to see if the testee hesitates linking “black and good” or “white and bad”. Then switch the categories, but don’t count incorrect responses since these may be caused by the testee being accustomed to clicking a particular way.
In any event, a test that is justified by jargon like “unconscious ideas” or “preconscious set of assumptions” or “potential racist attitudes, however pre-conscious” is automatically suspect, seeing as this is at most two steps removed from blaming invisible elves.
Why? We’re not talking about Freud’s bullshit theory of the subconscious. We’re talking about a part or parts of the brain that gather only the most important information, often outside of our consciousness, in the interest of getting things done more efficiently, or making judgments (such as jumping out of the way of a speeding car – like you have time to register consciously your life’s in danger?) without realizing we have made them. There is so much research done on this, in so many different ways, it would make your head spin. For a very basic introduction to how the subconscious behaves, I’d advise you to read “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. Or if you want to read something really heavy, try “Descartes’ Error” by Antonio Demasio. It is considered one of the greats in neuroscience and behavioral research:
René Descartes - Wikipedia’_Error
Particularly fascinating to me is his “red deck” experiment, in which subjects were playing a game–four decks, two red and two blue. One of the decks (blue) was rigged to win, the other (red) was rigged to lose. The subject was able to draw at any time from either. They found that by about the 50th draw the subjects knew something was up with the red deck, but they couldn’t articulate why they were avoiding it. By about 83rd draw they could. They then hooked subjects up to heart rate monitor/sweat/stress sensors and repeated the experiments. This is what they found: by about 13th draw, the subjects were showing stress signals, elevated heart rate, and sweating, and deliberately avoiding the red deck, even though they were not consciously aware they were doing so until about 40 draws later, and not able to reason WHY they were doing so until even later than that. So basically we have a clear, very reputable case here where behavior was clearly being guided by unconscious processes.
For a very detailed explanation of this experiment, go here:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/23/8351
Or try “Moral Minds” by Marc Hauser, a fascinating look at the way all humans make moral judgments using neuropsychology, social science, linguistics and anthropology as its research base.
All three are incredibly fascinating and informative reads on the nature of the unconscious.
Honestly I’m stunned that so many people are skeptical of something as simple as an Implicit Association Test. My husband and I both work with Drs. of Social Psychology at the University of Michigan on a regular basis. There is not a damn person here who seriously dismisses the scientific validity of IATs. Why? Because they’ve been tested and used and retested and used and tested and used over and over again. Science is structured to challenge itself, always, and the IAT seems to pass the test. I can count off the top of my head 5 books I’ve read in the last year – research-based scientific books by experts in the field, mind you–that cite IATs as valid scientific evidence.
The truth is, people think they do things all the time that they’re not doing. Human perception is fallible and unreliable. A famous tennis player can tell you how he manages such a great serve–an expert in his field–you have to tuck your wrist under, or whatever–but he turns out to be wrong, even doing the opposite of what he said you have to do to make a good hit. People believe based on their own perceptions and belief persistence that catharsis works, that venting or acting out something violent prevents the person from really “exploding” – but when actual observations are made of these people, when experiments are done, the opposite turns out to be true–venting increases aggressive behavior. (Here’s a link to one New York Times newspaper article that broached the topic: THE NEW YORK TIMES SCIENCE TUESDAY, MARCH 9, 1999) If you want I can give you a link to about 15 separate studies showing a link between media violence and violent behavior, but that’s a whole other topic.)
So no, I’m sorry, I don’t put much stock in anecdotal reporting. There are vast quantities of research that say anecdotal reporting counts for shit.
And there seems to be a misunderstanding here, that IATs are supposed to measure whether a person is racist or not. That’s a bit misleading. The goal of the studies is to make observations about cultural trends – a single individual taking the test is but a drop in the pool-- the ocean itself is what’s trying to be described here. So don’t take it personally. Implicit Associations are a part of life, a fact of social psychology. It’s why cops accidentally shoot unarmed black guys – not because they’re overtly racist, but because in the heat of the moment their subconscious overgeneralizes and they get kicked into fight or flight mode with then renders them even more unable to pick up visual cues such as facial expressions of fear or verbal cues such as confusion. Everything gets scrambled. BAM! Man down. (That’s from “Blink” btw)
It kills me how skeptical people can be about things that, from a scientific standpoint, are blatantly obvious.
ETA: I want to make abundantly clear that doing the test on your own home computer can hardly be considered scientifically valid. When the hard research is done on IATs it’s done consistently, in a laboratory setting.
Well, thanks for the vindication, since I alluded to that way back in post #21.
My objection to Pjen’s use of jargon is that once the “pre-conscious” is invoked, all variety of theories can be advanced and few disproven. Was it a typo, or was it a manifestation of one’s pre-conscious? Who knows?
I just knew it off the top of my head.