On a night at the end of last fall, I sat down in a Harvard Square bar with a couple of friends and learned an important truth about myself: I’m an Asian supremacist.
The methodology for my discovery was through the 'Asian IAT' test on Project Implicit. The test measured my bias by asking me to identify a white, Asian, native, or foreign choice from a pair of flashed images. After I completed the test, the scores were aggregated and the result presented – I learned that I was one of around five percent of test takers who strongly associated 'Asian' and 'native'. So, in other words, the test revealed that I was... yup, that rare breed of bigot, an Asian supremacist?
I thought this was a fairly amusing result. The best part was that my result technically cannot be true – anyone with a basic grasp of American history knows Asians are as native to America as Oreo cookies are integral to a healthy diet. Perhaps the test should have recommended remedial history coursework instead of making a declarative statement about my biased worldview (1).
This experience makes me wonder what these tests really measure and whether those measurements have any relevant insight into my nature. The stated purpose of the test is to examine my unconscious bias. It does so by asking that I rapidly associate one image or another to one of the aforementioned categories. After doing this over and over, the test has a good sense of what goes on beneath my deliberate thinking. On the surface, the test conditions replicate an environment where my unconscious bias would guide my associations by stripping my conscious (and overriding) mind of its only advantage - time. I think the design of the test is more or less OK on paper. However, a good thesis never guaranteed a strong conclusion and I suspect something along those lines is what happens in many cases when these kinds of tests are used to measure bias.
I think the trickiest problem to untangle with this test is that a lot of what I do unconsciously is the result of prior thinking, training, and action. It's like how I type these sentences - I've deliberately practiced so much that I can go entire paragraphs without thinking at all about how to hit the keys and punch out nonsense like this very post. It’s hard to know if my preference for Asian associations on this test was due to something untapped in my unconscious or if it merely reflects a worldview I’ve deliberately cultivated over years of absorbing and thinking about the evidence. Consider for example how in the month prior to my flunking this exam Harvard University came under significant public scrutiny for admissions practices that allegedly disadvantaged Asian applicants. The eventual lawsuit suggested that if given two otherwise identical applicants, Harvard systematically chose the white student ahead of the Asian one. I knew this story as I walked in the shadow of the same university on my way to the bar that night. I knew the story had a ring of truth based on my own experiences. Most importantly, I knew this was just another story in a long line of similar tales.
My test results suggest I’m no better than Harvard - we stand accused of sharing an underlying bias when we make decisions and our biases become obvious anytime we are systemically presented with a choice of one option or another. However, given that this test suggested I'm biased, I'd say my version is the preferred one. In a country where no one ever accuses anyone of favoring Asians, I don't think it's crazy at all that someone might have learned over time to correct a bit for society's misplaced biases. The world would undoubtedly be a better place if we all became capable of overcoming our biases and seeing each other as equals before making our decisions. However, we can also come close enough to that ideal by acknowledging our hidden biases and making outward corrections until our inner preferences match the deliberate decisions we make in front of the watching world. Until then, I'll accept my ridiculous test results and comfort myself knowing that at the very least I wouldn't get sued if I were the one picking Harvard's next incoming class.
Footnotes / more inflammatory remarks
1. 'Native' in the way Christopher Columbus would describe it...
I understand that the opposite of my results is true – white people (or at least, some subset of white people) are native to the USA. Therefore, my results are likely being framed as the 'opposite' of those who strongly associate white and native. I don't think imposing a continuum on the results is a great excuse for coming up with the historically false association of Asian and native, though.
