IAT blog

As someone who considers themselves open-minded and accepting of all walks of life, I took the IAT with conceptions in mind already of how I would fare. As someone without any conscious biases I expected the IAT to reflect this lack of biases. I took the tests for the gender/job and the black/white faces.

The first test, the black & white bias test, confirmed my conscious belief that I was not biased one way or the other regarding race. I was categorized as someone who does not favor one race over another. This was not surprising, as my whole life I have been around people of all races. My father was a reggae musician for several years up until I was 3 years old, and as a result had many friends of African American descent who babysat me or came to the house from the time I was very young. Early on I learned that people were all different colors and never thought much about race until middle school when race suddenly became a conscious issue between my peers and I. Despite cultural differences that emerged during middle school, I maintained relationships with my friends of various races and have always supported the idea that ALL men are created equal.

The second test, the gender/job correlation test addressed an issue that I care deeply about. Gender roles for females have always outraged me, as I feel that women have been oppressed and under-advantaged because of their societal roles for centuries. Because of these beliefs, I was extremely surprised by the results that I was moderately biased toward men with scientific professions and women with humanities professions. It was especially stunning because when I came to Southwestern I was a biology major aspiring to become a bio-engineer. Furthermore, I refuse to see male doctors and will only rely on female doctors within the field. I thought for a while after reading my results about why I would receive such results. My first reaction, which may not be completely wrong, was to think that it had to do with the order in which the categories appeared. The intuitive societal beliefs were presented first, followed by the non-traditional roles second. I feel that in all three of the tests I was slower when attempting the second condition than the first. Despite this test-order bias, I strongly believe that my results reflected not a personal bias but rather reflected the well-known societal bias toward these career paths and the personality traits associated with them between the genders. Perhaps because of the stereotypes and proportions of actual men and women in these fields that I have personally encountered I am more likely to associate women with the liberal arts and men with the sciences. I need to re-evaluate my own perceptions and assumptions about these professions and the professionals within them.

In order to test my theory that the tests indicate an influence by the effects of the order presentation, I retook the tests in order to determine whether or not order effects were influencing the results. I retook the gender/career IAT, and this time the counter-intuitive or less societal norm condition was presented first. The results indicated a complete flip, in which I was slightly biased toward men having liberal arts professions and women having more science-based professions. This change in results indicates that I am slower at learning the associations for the second condition, after I already have the old associations learned. I feel like while the IAT is valid to some extent, because of order-effects one would need to retry the test at least 3 times to ensure that the results reflect internal beliefs or biases rather than a reflection of the order effect of the conditions.