<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Although we might want to say that we see everything as equal, there is a field of unconscious bias which changes the way we perceive things and interact with others. The Implicit Association Test was a wake up call for subjects who realized their own hidden biases existed, and a former City College proffessor, Kenneth Clark, showed evidence in the </span><i><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Brown v Board</span></i><span style=”font-weight: 400;”> decision that racism in fact created internalized prejudice. Being a psych student, I’ve learned about the instinctive feelings we all try to supress and I am not immune to it either.</span>
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>I decided to try the IAT myself, and was actually really surprised by the results. There are multiple tests from sexuality to race to weight and you have to associate terms with these groups of people as fast as you can. I took a few and my results varied. For starters, I am an Asian American and strongly advocate for other immigrants who come to this country and feel as if they are left out. We are as American as the white people next door. However, my test results showed that I was only slightly faster to associating “American” to “European” and “Foreign” to “Asian.” As someone who is active on social media, I always see people saying white people are much more American than ‘foreigners’. Has my constant exposure to this led me to unconsciously associate the same? When I took the test again, the results were opposite and I was slightly more associate with Asians and America and vice versa. Does acknowledging our bias make us feel like we need to change? Is that why my score was different? Or was it since I already took it before I was faster at grouping items? Through other tests, I got results about my slight preference for darkskins over lightskins, strong bias towards Islam over Christianity, strong preference for young people over old and slight preference for the gays over the heteros. Some of these weren’t surprising since I do resonate with Gen Z and have bad experiences with baby boomers. However, many other tests I took put me in a deep sense of getting to know myself better. The videos in which critiquing one another were discussed also had me critiquing my interactions with everyone of different backgrounds. All of us have varied feelings somewhere, and it’s important to let myself not turn bias into strong prejudice.</span>
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