The first IAT I took was the one regarding skin color, and it told me that I have a moderate preference towards lighter skinned people over darker skinned people. This surprised me because I grew up a part of a predominately black family, and I don't exhibit any biases today since I'm biracial. I may or may not have made too many errors on this (when they flip the categories it threw me off) so this result may not be very accurate. I wouldn't consider myself biased towards one skin color at all. Did anyone else take this one?
I then took the age IAT and, unsurprisingly, it told me I have a slight preference to younger people than to older people. I'm by no means an "old soul" but I don't have any issues communicating with people older than I am, but I can understand where the IAT results come from. I think in this day and age we have proclivities to associate ourselves more with people of our generation and may find older people intimidating to communicate with, and sometimes I find myself in that place. I'm sure someone else in the class got this result. What do you think?
Finally, I took the IAT on sexuality and I'm not entirely shocked by the result that I have a slight preference towards straight people. While I don't think these biases are problematic, I think most people are socialized early in life (depending upon your family, so I won't overgeneralize this) and carry these biases, even if they don't realize it, later in life. I'm not letting this result detract from anything in my personal life, however.
Overall, IAT's are slightly aggravating to me because they bring to the surface unconscious biases that many try to combat because it's not how they would like to carry themselves. I think some of these implicit biases results are a product of errors in testing but I think it's interesting where we all fall on the continuum, and whether or not if we agree with that placement.
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