Implicit prejudices

Harvard has tests available to measure your subconscious prejudices. We were taking them in Psych today. Apparently, I more readily associate “Australia” with “good” than I do “United States” with “good” (and the inverse is true for “bad”); subconsciously, I’m a “moderate” nationalist. There are some very, very interesting tests, even you don’t like the results…

Let me tell you a story…

Once upon a time, at Cambridge University, a group of research psychologists came up with a question. This question was, “Do artificially-conceived children have any more emotional issues than their naturally-conceived counterparts?” And of course, if you’re a research psychologist with a burning curiosity such as this one, what better to do than conduct a piece of research?

So it was done.

They designed an iron-clad method of conducting their study. It could not possibly fail. They would ask almost 200 children — representative of a variety of methods of conception, including the old-fashioned way — to draw a “map” of themselves and their parents, illustrating the closeness of their relationships. They would ask these children’s mothers to complete surveys regarding their child’s behaviour and emotional wellbeing. Then, wary of that tendency of mothers to talk up their children, they would survey the schoolteachers. And, to put the icing on the cake, they decided to mislead all the teachers into believing they were participating in a study on childhood development — even though the teachers had no idea how their students were conceived anyway, so their answers would probably not have changed even if they’d known the truth. Still, our intrepid research psychologists were taking no chances.