Project Implicit

= Citizen Science project in the field of psychology

URL = https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

Description

Dave Munger:

"Project Implicit is an ongoing series of experiments into the nature of human bias, hosted by Harvard University but incorporating research from around the world. The idea behind these studies is that people won’t always overtly express their biases. For example, in most communities in the US it is socially unacceptable to be overtly racist. Even so, people often make negative assumptions about people based solely on perceived race. The implicit attitude test measures your reaction time as you categorize words, faces, or other stimuli. If you’re faster to categorize a certain-race face with negative words, then it stands to reason that you may be implicitly—even unconsciously—biased against that race, though you might never admit or realize it.

The experiment I tried concerned hypothetical races, “Niffian” and “Laapian,” and was conducted by Anna Newheiser of Yale University. I was immediately able to learn that I had a strong preference for one of these imaginary races. According to the website, this experiment may reveal more about how people respond to real races. Project Implicit has been responsible for dozens of research papers about bias, including this one discussed on my blog, about how children develop racial stereotypes." (http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/creating_citizen_scientists/)