Be part of some research on racial attitudes

Andrew Leigh writes to me and through to me to you gentle Troppodillians:

With my ANU colleague Alison Booth, I’m presently doing some research on racial attitudes in Australia. As part of that, Alison and I are hoping to get a sample of Australians to do an Implicit Association Test, which we’ve set up at www.iat.org.au.

If you’d be willing to publicise it through your blog, we’d be most grateful. Naturally, we’ll keep you posted on the results, and the test also allows people to enter their email address if they would like to receive a copy of the study.

Andrew could do this better if his current employer, the Treasury, had not required him to cease from blogging altogether.  But there you go.  Worse things have happened and we can all help out.

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Richard Green
Richard Green
16 years ago

Now here is a minor and belated curse coming from the Stolen Generation. IAT tests become that little quantumn less useful when such a large number of indigenous Australians (particularly those whom would be encountered by the average Australian) have Anglo-Celtic names.

I wonder if they could have done a test with photos instead.

anon
anon
16 years ago

I’ve done one of these tests today and it stated i prefer heterosexuals and prefer McCain, neither of which could be further from the truth. Neither of these assertions are true! I find that whenever the test asks you to ‘switch’ you make a mistake. so if it is “i,i,i,i,i,i” you’re not going to make a mistake but if it is “i,i,i,i,e” you are. This test registered a strong preference towards anglosaxon for me because in the anglosaxon test there was a 15 word long loop of happy words associated with anglosaxons.

This test might be useful to analyse populations but i don’t think it works very well on an individual level.

Tom N.
Tom N.
16 years ago

One interesting aspect of the test was the question listing options about “how close to someone of X racial group youd be willing to become.” Apparantly, accepting someone as a family member is seen as a closer tie than accepting someone as a good friend. I disagree with this view – I accept my in-laws as members of “the family”, and would do so even if they were baby-killers, pedophiles or church goers; I doubt that I would choose to have such people as my friends, however.

Richard Green
Richard Green
16 years ago

I’m also a bit worried that in my case at least, they had the aboriginal/bad-caucasian/good couplets before the aboriginal/good-caucasian/bad couplets. If this is the same in all tests, then I think there might be more mistakes in the second couplets because we have to unlearn the reflexes learnt in the first test before learning the new ones, which takes longer than learning from scratch, perhaps like how it is easier to learn a manual car from the beginning than switch over from an automatic.

James Hamilton
James Hamilton
16 years ago

I’m off to do the test but will confess to being a name-ist pig. The moral dilemma posed by Mrs Palin with those names she gave her kids may yet cause my head to explode.

FDB
FDB
16 years ago

Richard – if they’re not randomly switching the order, I’d be very suurprised. My test was the same as you’ve described, though.

ChrisPer
ChrisPer
16 years ago

I quit the test when the Italian and Bad were put on the same side in the first conjoining of categories, and anglo and good on the other. I did not see why these categories should be put together; maybe the design was to surprise us into revealing associations between race and badness, but I felt manipulated and quit.

Curiously, I feel like adding some abuse, but that is perhaps from associating ‘bad’ with ‘manipulation’.

Chris Lloyd
Chris Lloyd
16 years ago

ChrisPer, errr…..I think the point of the test was to see which ethnicities you most easily associate with good and bad. Your quitting the test means that it is apparently selection biased against the politically correct. I wonder whether you would come out moderately associating indiginous with bad and anglo with good. Go on. Challenge yourself!

BTW: FDB and Richard. My test was the same as both of yours.

Andrew Leigh
16 years ago

Thanks folks – will be in touch with results before too long.

John Greenfield
John Greenfield
16 years ago

These tests are nonsensical. I got ‘liitle or no bias’ which is rubbish. I can tell you here and now if I am walking down a street and see a gang of aboriginal young men on one side and a gang of anglos on the other, I will walk on the Anglo side. Yet this test classes me as totally blind to such racist, evil, and possibly UN-Convention breaking thought crimes!

If I were told those names were Scottish people or Swedish, I doubt the results would have been any different. And one wonders how many people from full-blood aboriginal communities or those where they actually have names like those on the IAT – rather than Smith, O’Donohue, and Jones – were tested for Thought Crimes Against Whitey!?

Set up a similar test for Leftists but instead of aboriginal names use Cohen, Schwartz, Dershowitz, etc. Heh.

John Greenfield
John Greenfield
16 years ago

Richard Green

Your assumption that aboriginal men and women only marry white people if they are “stolen” is racist, offensive, and totally clueless about Australian society.

Richard Green
Richard Green
16 years ago

What the hell?

It took me a long time to understand what you meant.

I only meant that the members of the stolen generation tended to have names either granted by the institutions that took them in or their adoptive parents. Marriage played no part in it.

In fact, I initially pressed “aboriginal” for the “Amy Murphy” name since almost every koori I had met growing up had a celtic name (Maitland was also a very catholic area at the time).

Liam
Liam
16 years ago

JG, only you could take offence at not being called a bigot.

Melaleuca
Melaleuca
16 years ago

I think JG may be a socialist agent provocateur attempting to discredit conservatives.

ChrisPer
ChrisPer
16 years ago

Had another go. I think my offendedness was that I didn’t know how it worked and I couldn’t see how to react against offensive associations, which is my instinctive response.

Somewhat puzzled, as I only got Italian and Anglo, good/bad cases. Does that mean I am a control against Aboriginal/muslim current prejudices demonstrated by other people? What a shame, I actually have met some of those.

FDB
FDB
16 years ago

Mel, whatever he’s doing, he’s doing a shit job of it.

Nobody likes him or pays the least attention except to ridicule.

Actually scratch that first line. If his aim is to unite people across ideological divides in common cause for the betterment of Man, he’s doing just fine.

John Greenfield
John Greenfield
16 years ago

Richard, you still don’t get it. First of all, we are all past the myth of the “Stolen Generations.” Secondly, Aborigines have tended to marry non-aborigines for decades now. So most of those Anglo surnames on aboriginal-looking people are not the result of people theft, but two people falling in lopve and CHOOSING to marry outside racial pressures!

John Greenfield
John Greenfield
16 years ago

Mel

I don’t think “conservatives” – whoever they are- need any help from ME! :)