The first test I choose was the one entitled “Disability IAT”. The reason I choose this was because I like to think of myself as a sensitive person when it comes to people or animals with any disabilities. I also like learning about the different ways companies try to make their products more accessible to people with disabilities of any sort.
the first question was very odd to me. I actually stopped the survey and opened the blog to reflect on this. It says “How warm or cold do you feel towards Physically Abled People?”. Afterwards they asked the same question but for disabled people. I found that really odd because I would never image myself asking someone a question like that because of how rude it seems. Anyways, the game I played was basically trying to see if I have a bias toward or against people with abled and disabled individuals by trying to associate each group with positive and negative words at a time. I was actually a bit nervous about the results because what if I found out that I’m actually bias and noticed before. Luckily, when the results came out it said I wasn’t!
The second test I choose was the transgender one. Prior to taking the test, I know I have a bias against people who are transgender for religious reasons so I was very curious about what the results were actually going to be. In order to make it more challenging for the website, I didn’t answer the questions in the beginning that asked about how I felt towards transgender people.
The Forman or the test was very similar to the one I did before. What I found extremely surprising was that I had a difficult time associating positive words with transgender people and negative words with cisgender people. I thought I could fool the system but I was caught at the end. I’m still a bit convinced that they said I have a moderate bias against transgenders because I refused to answer the questions in the beginning or maybe because I did the test at 5AM after studying all night for a midterm. I want to try doing it again or something similar and give fact answers in the mini survey at the beginning.
After doing more research about the validity of these tests, I found that they are accurate 64% of the the time only.
In fact, the IAT cannot indicate whether a person is or is not prejudiced because it is not an explicit or self-report measure. I also found this discussion about the limitations of IAT.
The Daily Jazz 