Free Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective by Geoffrey Beattie

exposure to Obama during that week, in all probability, had a significant effect on Laura’s implicit attitude. Continued positive exposures to Black role models could lead to more permanent positive associations for Black people in general.
    At present there are something like fifteen versions of the IAT online at Project Implicit:
• Disability IAT
• Age IAT
• Gender–Science IAT
• Asian IAT
• Arab–Muslim IAT
• Native IAT
• Religion IAT
• Sexuality IAT
• Obama–McCain IAT
• Skin-tone IAT
• Weight IAT
• Presidents IAT
• Weapons IAT
• Gender–Career IAT
• Race IAT
    For a measure of unconscious processing, engaging on the IAT is an oddly self-conscious process. I am strangely anxious every time I do it, maybe because I think that this may reveal the uncomfortable truths about me. It is a quick test, almost too quick, and the computerised IAT flashes the results up at you without embarrassment or pause after the completion of each test. You sit nervously by the screen prepared to view your own prejudices and biases, secretly hoping that none will be revealed. Or at worst, hoping to seejust a slight prejudice in your reaction times and error rates, and the expression ‘Your data suggest a moderate preference for X over Y.’ Laura and I both sat all the tests that we thought might help produce a reasonable psychological profile for each of us, one after the other like a set of challenges. The results are given in Table 5.1 .
     
    Table 5.1
Our own IAT results
 
Geoff
Laura
Obama–McCain IAT
Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Barack Obama over John McCain
Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Barack Obama over John McCain
Race IAT
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for European American over African American
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for European American over African American
Skin-tone IAT
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for light skin over dark skin
Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for light skin over dark skin
Weight IAT
Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for thin people compared to fat people
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for thin people compared to fat people
Sexuality IAT
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for straight compared to gay people
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for straight compared to gay people
Age IAT
Your data suggest no automatic preference for young compared to old.
Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for young compared to old.

    We discovered that we were both strongly pro-Obama, which was fine, even a little reassuring (to my conscious mind). I admit that I could never take John McCain’s voice seriously, because of its pitch and general tone and the fact that it sounded like something computer-generated by Disney, and I am sure that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hassan Nasrallah and Muqtada al-Sadr couldn’t take it too seriously either. There was not much threat in that voice and the danger would always have been that the voice would have had to be backed up with what the military, and the new head of Central Command General David Petraeus, were now calling ‘kinetics’ (a term interestingly borrowed from mainstream psychology but now being used to refer to military action rather than action in general). After that I either had no preference (age) or a series of moderate preferences, except when it came to weight, where I had a strong preference for thin people compared to fat people (Laura’s only other strong preference was for light skin over dark skin).
    So what does any of this mean? Can I find any evidence from my own life that the implicit attitudes revealed by this test have any substantive or actual behavioural implications? I think that the answer with respect to my one strong prejudice (other than Obama) is probably yes. However, the behaviour is not to do with actual