The Project Implicit Test Paper

Although it may only be buried deep in the subconscious and implicit, nearly all people hold prejudiced views towards a specific race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, etc. However, because it is not obvious on the surface, many deny that they feel this way, but it is through tests like the Project Implicit at Harvard that true beliefs can be uncovered. The particular study on Race involved answering numerous questions about personal beliefs towards African Americans and European Americans, as well as an exercise involving word associations. At the conclusion, the participant receives results stating if he or she has a slight, moderate, strong, or no preferences at all towards one specific race, providing interesting, and often surprising, insights.
While there has been a drop in the number of people who do not endorse racism and prejudice today, it is still very common in society, both implicitly and explicitly. This has been proven through behavioral experiments such as those related to seating
distance, job seeking, and helping behavior. Nevertheless, people do not understand or choose not to believe the facts, so the Harvard Project Implicit was created. The test required participants to place words or pictures of people who are clearly European American or African American under their respective heading and the reaction time is measured. For example, “joyful” would be placed under the “good/European” category or “good/African” category, depending on what portion of test is being taken. However, if a person implicitly believed that European Americans were superior to African Americans, he or she would have a faster reaction time when placing “joyful” under the “good/European” category. Finally, the participant answers several general opinion-questions regarding his or her explicit prejudiced behavior, usually on a scale from strongly negative to strongly positive. At the conclusion of the test, Harvard would provide him or her with results based on the answers provided. Possible outcomes are strong, moderate, or slight preference to a specific race or “too many errors.” Therefore, those who are often skeptical about their own racism are able to get results from a university-based study.
The Project Implicit test relates to many of the topics discussed in class on racism and prejudice.
First, participants may exercise prejudiced behavior towards their outgroup, whether implicitly or explicitly, as they do not share membership and feel they are “vastly different” from themselves. Therefore, by associating negative words with the outgroup, it shows that the participant does have tendencies to be prejudiced. Furthermore, since prejudiced behavior protects self-esteem, people tend to associate the positive characteristics and words with their ingroup and the opposite with the negative ones. So, by being able to more quickly assign negative characteristics to those in the outgroup on the test, participants are implicitly bolstering their own self-esteem. Finally, this study proves that when conducting job interviews and reviewing applications in the workplace, employers may implicitly discriminate against other races or members of a different
group.
In conclusion, the development of the Harvard Project Implicit study is instrumental in allowing people to understand implicit versus explicit prejudice and how it affects them in their day-to-day life. By doing such actions, one’s self-esteem can be protected and/or bolstered and a person can see the differences between ingroups and outgroups that make them distinct. Unfortunately, racism is clearly proven to still exist in the world during 2015 and perhaps this experiment will truly shed light on this if it becomes more mainstream across the country.