I recently took a series of implicit bias tests for this course and was both surprised and unsurprised with my results. On the first test I took, the “Weapons” test, my results showed a moderate automatic association for Harmless objects with White Americans and Weapons with Black Americans. This test’s design initially struck me as odd as the weapons they choose to use were atypical of my understanding of violent crimes. Showing cannons and flails were not the typical weapons I would picture when thinking of weapons used to commit crimes in the modern era. I thought it was interesting how at first the researchers associated the weapons with Blacks and the non-harmful objects with Whites. Looking back at this test, I learned that it is a natural
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I thought this test was a lot different than the other ones; it made me feel like the researchers were almost setting us up to come out as biased against Gay people. Associating negative words with homosexuality is a way of skewing the results, in my opinion. I am proud of the results I got because I do not know very many gay or lesbian people and I never really grew up having any friends come out. I can count the number of gay people I personally know on one hand. I learned from this that if any of my friends do come out to me that I should ideally be very accepting and treat them the same as I treat my straight friends. My limited experiences with people of the LGBT community may have hindered my ability to develop any subconscious biases and, for that, I am thankful.
Overall, I do not think the implicit bias tests monitored my feelings very well; my experiences led me to conclude that there are a ton of errors in the study. There were at least ten different times that I meant to hit one key and I hit the other, even though I knew what I was trying to press. I guess the researchers took that into consideration when creating the test and hopefully accounted for that error. This opened my eyes to the fact that people can think they have absolutely no bias or a bias towards one group and then it could be the complete
I thought this test was a lot different than the other ones; it made me feel like the researchers were almost setting us up to come out as biased against Gay people. Associating negative words with homosexuality is a way of skewing the results, in my opinion. I am proud of the results I got because I do not know very many gay or lesbian people and I never really grew up having any friends come out. I can count the number of gay people I personally know on one hand. I learned from this that if any of my friends do come out to me that I should ideally be very accepting and treat them the same as I treat my straight friends. My limited experiences with people of the LGBT community may have hindered my ability to develop any subconscious biases and, for that, I am thankful.
Overall, I do not think the implicit bias tests monitored my feelings very well; my experiences led me to conclude that there are a ton of errors in the study. There were at least ten different times that I meant to hit one key and I hit the other, even though I knew what I was trying to press. I guess the researchers took that into consideration when creating the test and hopefully accounted for that error. This opened my eyes to the fact that people can think they have absolutely no bias or a bias towards one group and then it could be the complete