Implicit Bias

I was introduced to the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as part of a sociology course I took during my senior year of undergrad. If memory serves correct (which admittedly, it rarely does — another thing we explored during that sociology class) I took the race, weight, and presidents tests, because those were the tests assigned to the class. I don’t remember being particularly surprised by my results, and moved on from the experience.

Taking this test again was different, it was up to us to choose which test we wanted to take, and I didn’t know what to choose. I ended up assigning a number to each of the tests, writing the numbers on scraps of paper, and putting all of the scraps in a hat — whichever piece of paper my partner pulled out would be the test I would take.

I chose test #3 which was the “Gender-Career” test, and the results showed that I have a “moderate automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family.” This wasn’t particularly surprising to me, albeit a bit disappointing. I was raised in a small town in the midwest, I’m 25 and many of the people I went to high school with have been married for a couple years, some of them already have kids. Growing up, there was a lot of social emphasis put on the church, and having a family — one that is heteronormative, where the mom stays at home and the dad “brings home the bacon.”

My family fell outside of this because my parents got divorced when I was 9. After that my family stopped attending church regularly, and I started to identify as agnostic. I think because of their divorce, and my being raised by a single father, who encouraged my sister and me to pursue anything we were passionate about, I don’t have a strong automatic association, but the subliminal messaging from the larger community in which I was raised clearly had an impact.

In terms of how all of this relates to my participation in this course, I think that it’s a good example of how the way we were raised / our personal histories are often inescapable. Even though I didn’t identify / hold the same values as the community I was raised in, actively sought out a different kind of life, and identify as queer, I still implicitly hold some of the heteronormative values I was raised around.

I think it’s a good lesson to take a moment and pause, before beginning a project / interacting with a new community. That pause would be to reflect on your personal history / background because your background will be brought into the work that you’re doing, even if you don’t directly identify with that background (I’m not religious, but I was raised in a religious community). After that pause, it would be beneficial to take a relevant IAT test before starting said new project, or approaching a particular community as a way to get ahead of the biases you hold. Bias is inescapable, but I think it is navigable if you are aware of it.