« Vacation is Over | Main | Today’s Tally »
May 18, 2006
Unconscious Bias
Yesterday I was reading Scientific American – both for fun and for story ideas :) – and found a great article called “The Implicit Prejudice.” It’s about the biases and prejudices we hold even when we don’t realize it. Or to quote the article: “underneath our awareness, our minds automatically make connections and ignore contradictory information.” The article is also about how we acquire these biases by what we are exposed to.
(I kind of wish I’d read this before I submitted “Osmosis” to Haruah. It would have fit in perfectly with my essay.)
I would like to point you to the article online but it’s in the June issue, which doesn’t seem to be on their website yet. But maybe later it will be there. It would be under the “Insight” section of the current issue (once the current issue is June 2006).
Actually if you can’t wait, it looks like you can buy an electronic issue online now here.
Something that is currently available online for free is this related website, mentioned in the article, where you can test your biases:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
It’s called an implicit association test (IAT). The site lists several. I’ve already done two. The Gender-Science test showed that I have a slight association of female with science and male with liberal arts, which is perhaps unusual but in my case not all that surprising since I’m a woman who loves science.
Posted by Selena at May 18, 2006 10:43 AM