Are You Who You Think You Are?

A little web entertainment for a Saturday at home; hope you're having a nice one. Mine is quiet, full of cold brilliant sunshine spilling in on my shoulder, cats and dog sleeping in pools of it on the kitchen floor.

The entertainment is to be found here, at Project Implicit. Go to the "Research" page, register, log-in, and you will be ready to take as many tests as you have time for, then come back later for more.

Here you will have the opportunity to assess your conscious and unconscious preferences for over 90 different topics ranging from pets to political issues, ethnic groups to sports teams, and entertainers to styles of music. At the same time, you will be assisting in a large-scale study of preferences.

The deal is that we consciously have a set of beliefs, we have gut responses, and then we have hidden biases of which we are almost unaware. I took two of the tests, was surprised by one, and not so much by the other. The first one measured the qualities "trusting" and "skeptical" in my personality. I tend to think of myself as a strongly skeptical person, and the study results showed entirely the opposite. According to this, I am a strongly trusting person. The first test that came up was on attitudes towards Homosexual vs Straight People, and unfortunately I didn't yet know what I was doing and lost it. I certainly hope it will come up for me again someday. I discovered this site via Tolerance.org, a web project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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