I stumbled across something I found extremely interesting
while reading Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous
Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. He referenced a
test called Implicit Association Test (IAT) that the reader can it on the internet
at Projectimplicit.org. Haidt, the author warned people that taking the test
could be disturbing—I found this intriguing.
Apparently, the test is a modified word association test like
the ones we often hear about; I say a word and you respond. Only in this test, you
are given both the word and the response and the lapse of time it takes you to decide
if the words match in sentiment; the lapse of time it takes to respond is what
is measured; we are talking in terms of milliseconds. The test giver, which can
be ones self, flashes the word pairs on a screen in sequence but for only long
enough to read them. If the first word
is pleasant or pleasing to you and the second word is not, it takes longer to
respond than if the second word was also pleasing. The same thing happens in
the reverse feeling; that is if the first word is unpleasant and the second is
pleasing. In other words, it is the agreement between words that is being
decided.
Investigators can apply the test to social attitudes with a
great deal of plasticity. For example, when applied to politics, the test
indicates political preference. If the first word is “food stamps” and the second
word is “sunshine”, the time it would take for the person to agree that they
matched in sentiment would be longer for a Republican than for a Democrat. In
other words, it takes longer to decide if a change in innate sentiment is
required. The unpleasantness Jonathan Haidt mentioned comes about when we use
the test as a “lie detector test”. For example, if I show you a picture of a
black person and the word “danger” as opposed to showing you a picture of a
black person and the word “sunshine” and it takes you longer to respond to the
second combination. The test result would suggest you have an innate racial bias,
which might be different from what you are saying to people about what you believe
or do not believe about race. The indications are that more white people have a
racial bias then surveys generally indicate. The same would be true of
attitudes toward politicians, homosexuality, belief in God, Islam, and a long,
long list of etceteras.
I see it as being equivalent to lie detector tests measuring
changes in physiological parameters such as galvanic skin response without all
the wires and special machines. I believe that human beings often fool themselves
into believing things counter to their genetically embedded nature ass the
results about race indicate. I do not believe I am prejudice but I find I do
have some innate bias—something that shames me. As people who follow this blog
know, I write about racism in terms of focused xenophobia being embedded in our
bestial genetic make up. In addition, I point out that I believe we as a
society are learning to “control” or suppress our biological or innate nature—racism
is a two way street. By the process of learned selection, we are slowly
changing the human genome by changing gene frequency. Indications are that it
will take something like 30 generations (my guess) to change gene frequency; a
painfully slow process. At 20 years per generation that would be 600 years but
when we look at our humanization process that is changing bestial attitudes, we
have many, many generations already invested.
URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated
No comments:
Post a Comment