My results for the IAT did not come as a surprise to me at all. The test that I chose to take was about religion, and had me associate words and symbols from Christianity and Judaism with positive and negative words to determine whether or not I had an automatic preference towards a certain religion. My results said that I had a strong automatic preference towards Christianity, which I figured would happen since I come from a very Catholic family. It’s no surprise that my religious upbringing would influence the way that I compare Christianity to other religions.
However, I found that the way in which the test was set up was not the best way in determining the results. In a way I kind of knew what my results would be going into the test, but the same could not be said for someone who was raised without religion, for example. The main part of the test had me first correctly associate positive adjectives with Christian words and symbols and associate negative adjectives with Jewish words and symbols. After several rounds of that and having that pattern in my mind, it was hard for me to immediately switch and switch the associations between religions and adjectives. I don’t think that I had trouble associating Jewish words and symbols with positive adjectives because I subconsciously am prejudiced against Judaism; I think I had trouble with it because I was so used to associating Christian words with positive adjectives, and my brain couldn’t break the pattern. Therefore, I think that the setup of this specific IAT could be improved upon in order to get a better understanding of people’s implicit biases in terms of religion.