IAT Test Post

I took the Religion IAT and it just involved three religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. My results were that I have a moderate automatic preference for Judaism over Islam. I am not very surprised at all by these results because out of all of the biases I have, I don’t think religion is a strong one of mine. However, obviously, as we’ve read and heard, this does not mean much because we have implicit biases without thinking about them and we just pass snap judgments without maybe even meaning to. Anyway, I was also not very surprised that, given that there had to be a preference, I have a preference for Judaism over Islam because I am friends with a lot of Jewish people but I do not think any of my friends or even anyone in my schools growing up were Muslim. Because of my environment and the religions I have been exposed to and associate certain people in my life with, it makes sense why my preference leans toward Judaism. I do wish the test included more religions to see what my preference would be because just doing the test between two religions feels too general. Even though I am not surprised by the results of the test, I don’t see how the test I took could determine this automatic preference of mine. All the test had me do was give an immediate response whether something belonged to Islam or Judaism or whether it is something good or bad. When I made a mistake, it was because I was tired of clicking not because of something else, so I would like to take another test to see if there is a better way to determine this implicit bias.

One thought on “IAT Test Post

  1. Sean Corbett

    I took the Religion IAT as well, but got the opposite sorts of responses. The test revealed that I have a slight automatic preference for Christianity over Judaism. This result both surprises me and is what I expected at the same time. For the first 18 years of my life I lived at home, to two parents raised Catholic but who did not raise us in the faith- we attended a non-denominational church very sparsely and I do not consider myself religious. Because of this, I didn’t have a lot of religion in my life at all. On top of that, several of my closest friends from home are Jewish, so I learned a lot about their religion and am very warm to it, much more so than to Christianity. On the other hand, I live in college now with two roommates whoa re very strongly catholic, and it is possible their beliefs have rubbed off on me- especially since I am not religious and have no religious preference. Maybe it is my own implicit bias talking, but I am surprised in my results given my warmth towards Judaism and general disdain towards Christianity. But who am I to judge? it was implicit after all. I think taking the test again would benefit me as well.

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