I just finished listening to Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, a book by Malcomb Gladwell. This book is about rapid cognition and how accurate our instinctive responses can be. Some of the examples that Gladwell uses are related to race. One striking example of the power of the unconscious is an experiment he cites in which half of the randomly assigned participants, all African Americans, were asked to indicate their race prior to answering 20 questions from the GRE. The group of participants who were required to do so scored, on average, half as well as the control group. Evidence, Gladwell contends, that even African American’s perception of African Americans can be so negative as to adversely effect their performance, as indicated by the lower scores.

Later, Gladwell describes The Implicit Association Test (IAT), which tests individual’s instinctive association between pairs of words or images. In its most famous form, it assesses people’s underlying racial prejudices. You can take the test your self here. You’ll have to click through a couple screens and then choose the “Race IAT”. I’ve just finished taking it myself, and the summary page states the following.

  • 27% of respondents have a strong automatic preference for White people
  • 27% of respondents have a moderate automatic preference for White people
  • 16% of respondents have a slight automatic preference for White people
  • 17% of respondents have a no automatic preference between Black people and White people
  • 6% of respondents have a slight automatic preference for Black people
  • 4% of respondents have a moderate automatic preference for Black people
  • 2% of respondents have a strong automatic preference for Black people

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