WRITTEN BY: JENNA ANDERSON

Sometimes our biases are hard to see and you may not even be aware you have them. These are called implicit biases, which are subconscious attitudes that affect our understanding, actions and decisions regarding people based on things like ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation and/or appearance. Everyone has some form of implicit bias and the implicit associations we have may not even align with our declared beliefs.

Project Implicit has free online tests that measure implicit bias. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures people’s beliefs and attitudes by looking at their automatic associations that they may not be unaware of or are unwilling to report.

The IAT measures your strength of association between concepts (ex. women, visible minorities) and evaluations (ex. good, bad) or stereotypes (ex. Science, Athletic) to test for bias. The test asks you to quickly sort words into their appropriate category. Your implicit bias score is based on how quickly it takes you to sort the words (evaluations or stereotypes) into their correct categories when they are associated with different concepts. For example, if you are quicker to categorize words when Women and Humanities share a response key and Men and Science share a different response key, you may have an implicit bias that associates Men with STEM.  

Click here to take an IAT test.

Project Implicit is a non-profit organization developed by researchers who are interested in implicit social cognition, which are the thoughts and feelings outside of our conscious awareness and control. The organization also provides consulting, education and training services on implicit bias, diversity, leadership, applying science to practice and innovation. To learn more about Project Implicit and their resources visit their website.

Did you have an implicit bias you were unaware of? What can you do to change it?

• Take a seven-day bias cleanse that provides you with daily tasks that will help you learn how to de-bias yourself
• Check out WISE Atlantic’s video series about women in STEM careers who have overcome gender-bias. 
• Teachers and parents: take a look at MTV’s Emmy-Award winning Look Different toolkit as a guide for conversations with teens about biases.