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Well, I took it and it determined that I don't associate gender with science or liberal arts. It also felt extremely contrived, and felt as though it functions

Well, I took it and it determined that I don't associate gender with science or liberal arts. It also felt extremely contrived, and felt as though it functions largely on cheap tricks, like building a clear pattern of a theme being presented on one side of the screen for a long while and then suddenly switching it to the other side. To be frank, it seemed like the purpose of it was to induce cognitive stress from trying to figure out where you're trying to click than to actually assess anything to do with gender. I'm aware that biases are doubtless a very hard phenomenon to study accurately, because they can't simply be compared to some arbitrary 'unbiased' standard, because no-one is unbiased, but this did nonetheless feel like it was more a test of motor skills than beliefs. For what it's worth, I'd be interested in seeing something which accurately assesses personal biases, because it'd help one in determining where/if their reasoning might be being influenced by irrational factors.

mtrimpe 13y ago
The IAT is the bread-and-butter technique for determining implicit associations and are probably the best technique we have for assessing personal bias. When you try it out for a topic where you do have a strong association you'll actually feel directly what it's measuring and why it's relevant. P.S. Did you really try to answer as fast as possible? If you take your time it won't be able to measure much.
- elohesra 13y ago
  Yes I really did try to answer as soon as possible. Why would I not? Because it might give me a 'bad' evaluation? Why would I care when I don't even feel that it's valid? In fact, attempting to answer quickly is what lead me to feel it was largely a trick, because it switched up locations of gender after consistent streaks of a given gender (or other metric) being presented solely in one place. Several times I'd be just about to click something and then think "Hey, what the heck? Why did it suddenly move the answer?". This represents a confounding variable in the experiment, because it no longer strictly measures beliefs, but instead measures a mixture of beliefs and motor ability (ability to react quickly to the changing locations of answers), so the test can't determine if an answer was due to belief or motor ability.
  - mtrimpe 13y ago
    Wasn't implying anything ... just making sure you did the test correctly. And I think you were reading too much into the random placement. The test just picks a number of words for each category at random and then determines whether it's easier for you to categorize certain things together. You'll be able to respond faster to 'good & saint' and 'bad & killer' than 'good & killer' and 'bad & saint' because your brain categorizes them differently and that difference in performance is what this test measures.

mtrimpe 13y ago

The IAT is the bread-and-butter technique for determining implicit associations and are probably the best technique we have for assessing personal bias. When you try it out for a topic where you do have a strong association you'll actually feel directly what it's measuring and why it's relevant. P.S. Did you really try to answer as fast as possible? If you take your time it won't be able to measure much.

elohesra 13y ago
Yes I really did try to answer as soon as possible. Why would I not? Because it might give me a 'bad' evaluation? Why would I care when I don't even feel that it's valid? In fact, attempting to answer quickly is what lead me to feel it was largely a trick, because it switched up locations of gender after consistent streaks of a given gender (or other metric) being presented solely in one place. Several times I'd be just about to click something and then think "Hey, what the heck? Why did it suddenly move the answer?". This represents a confounding variable in the experiment, because it no longer strictly measures beliefs, but instead measures a mixture of beliefs and motor ability (ability to react quickly to the changing locations of answers), so the test can't determine if an answer was due to belief or motor ability.
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  Wasn't implying anything ... just making sure you did the test correctly. And I think you were reading too much into the random placement. The test just picks a number of words for each category at random and then determines whether it's easier for you to categorize certain things together. You'll be able to respond faster to 'good & saint' and 'bad & killer' than 'good & killer' and 'bad & saint' because your brain categorizes them differently and that difference in performance is what this test measures.