In the Critical thinking podcast, Dr. Bezio emphasizes how bias is viewed so negatively in our society, even though it is a somewhat natural result of the content we consume, and that the only way to change it or prevent it is to purposefully expose ourselves to culture and content that we don’t normally engage with, or that defies general expectations. After listening I decided that I wanted to take an implicit bias quiz to learn more about the biases that I might hold without realizing it, which are not necessarily bad, but are important to understand because it does affect one’s viewpoint of the world whether or not they are aware of it.<\/p>\n
I was surprised by the results of my implicit bias quiz, because although I don’t consider myself to have an outright bias, I thought that maybe a hidden bias would show up that I did not know about. I know that I don’t have an explicit bias against black people, but because of ideas spread in mainstream culture that tend to portray black people in a negative light, \u00a0I wanted to see if I had unconsciously picked up on those biases. I took the IAT test focused on the association between race and harmless objects\/weapons. My results ended up falling into the category of slight automatic association with Black Americans and Harmless Objects, and White Americans and Weapons. These are results generally shared by only 6% of the population, so I was very surprised, but also glad to see that my opinions are not popular opinions. But it is also disheartening to see that the majority of people have strong or moderate association with Black Americans and Weapons and White Americans and Harmless Objects. One thing that I thought while looking at the results was that most people who take tests like this generally want to learn more about their biases in order to do something about it, so I think that an even greater portion of the population would have a negative implicit bias against Black Americans.<\/p>\n
I think that the difference shown in my test results could be a reflection of the fact that I have paid attention to terror attacks in the United States, and school shootings, most of which have been committed by white men during my childhood, and I think that despite the way terrorists or “bad” people are represented in popular culture, my knowledge of current events has overshadowed that in my mind without my awareness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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