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Fun with implicit association tests
Implicit Association Tests are an interesting and sometimes controversial form of psychology experiment designed to measure unconscious associations. As described in Shankar Vedantam’s article on IATs in the Washington Post,
The Implicit Association Test is designed to examine which words and concepts are strongly paired in people’s minds. For example, “lightning” is associated with “thunder,” rather than with “horses,” just as “salt” is associated with “pepper,” “day” with “night.”
However, the associations measured are usually not so innocuous: IATs can assess unconscious racism by, for example, measuring whether we associate positive qualities with white faces and negative qualities with black faces.
For fun, we decided to take the Gender-Science IAT and learn how much we unconsciously associate women with liberal arts and men with science. (If you want to try it, you can go to the Project Implicit web page and click through to the demonstration tests, or go directly to the page where you choose a demonstration test and pick the Gender-Science IAT.) On the test, we had to sort words into categories as quickly as possible. The words on the test are associated with 4 categories: male (Man, Boy, Father, Male, etc), female (Girl, Female, Aunt, Daughter, etc), science (Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Math, etc), and liberal arts (Philosophy, Humanities, Arts, Literature).
Despite our low expectations, Dr. Medusa got the following exciting result:
Your data suggest little or no association between Male and Female with Science and Liberal Arts.
Only 28% of people do as well or better than we on the test (where we define “better” as “not associating male with science”). Yay for us!