Testing Your Unconscious Biases

A fellow writer discovered a Harvard webpage presenting tools for testing unconscious biases. You can find many tests there, the featured one on Election 2008. I had thought I knew all my own biases and didn't even need a test, but I took the "Asian American" test just for the sake of it. I chose the answer to the first question as "I like Asian Americans and European Americans equally." And to another I chose "I consider … descent equally American." After going through some image selections, this was what I got:

Your Result

Your data suggest a moderate association of Asian American with American and European American with Foreign compared to European American with American and Asian American with Foreign.

That was a surprise! Because consciously, for me, it is the opposite. It seems the test reaches its conclusions based on the number of mistakes you make. If you don't make any mistake, it probably won't let you finish. I am not sure how reliable the interpretation is, but it's kind of interesting.