The Harvard Implicit Association Test

I was re-reading Blink ,the new book by Malcolm Gladwell, (it's one of the books listed left under great books) and came across the Harvard Implicit Association Test.  I've decided try out my own version of the male/female preconception test in a training tomorrow to see if I can shock my trainees into being a little more aware of their own implicit ideas on how to categorise people.  It really makes my hair stand on end - the idea that even if you want to be liberal unbiased and fair, you will find it easy to allocate concepts to say...categories "female/domestic vs male/career" and much much more difficult to function when you are asked to allocate concepts to "female/career vs male/domestic".  Gladwell who was raised in a family with one black and one white parent describes his own dis-ease when struggling with allocation in "african american/good vs white european/bad".  The cultural forces that shape our implicit associations are so strong that we seem to not be able to help being slowed down, "confused" for a fraction of a second.  Apparently we don't choose to make these associations, but they are all around us, so our subconscious soaks them up.

If you want to try the test for yourself, Gladwell says you can log on at: www.implicit.harvard.edu.