I just took the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for Arab-Muslim perceptions. The IAT is an experimental method used to measure the strength of automatic association between mental representations of objects in memory. As stated on Harvard's website where the test is located, "It is well-known that people don't always 'speak their minds,' and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds.' Understanding such divergence is important to scientific psychology. If you're interested in testing your own conscious-unconscious divergences, take the quiz here.
I chose to take the test concerning Arabs/Muslims because the book we read focusing on this ethnic group in diversity class, "How Does it Feel to be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America," caught my attention the most out of any reading we've done thus far. The test began by asking some basic questions about whether or not I judge Arab Muslims, how I would rate my preference for Arab Muslims vs. other people, etc. Then it provided me with a list of terms for four categories: Good, Bad, Arab-Muslim, and Other People. The good and bad categories were mainly emotion words, such as happy and angry respectively, and the people categories consisted of Arab-Muslim names vs. other names. Then I went through a series of quick identifications where I had to categorize the words into their respective categories. It started out easy with Good vs. Bad and Arab-Muslim vs. Other People, but then required a bit more brain power as these respective categories were criss-crossed, into Good and Arab-Muslim vs. Bad and Other People for an example.
As I was doing these categorizations as quickly as I could, I noticed that I got a few more of the Other People selections wrong in comparison to Arab-Muslim. However, as I had never taken an IAT before I went in not knowing the consequences of my actions; I just tried to concentrate and get them all right in order to avoid the little red "x" that occurs when you miss one. It's in my nature to try and get as many things right as possible, and that's how I approached this test. I could even tell my hands were sweating a little because I was nervous about getting them all right.
My result from the test was a bit surprising to me, it said that I had a preference for Arab Muslims compared to other people. This was not a bias that I was aware of. When I was reading the names of "Other People" that belonged in that category, I noticed that they were still mainly names that I associated in my head with the label "ethnic names" like Takuyo and Ernesto, rather than popular Anglo names like Robert. But that was really my only observation and these results make me wonder if there was something about those names in particular that made me biased against "other people." The results also made me reconsider my attitudes toward Arab Muslims in search of the root behind this test result.
I think that the main reason I show preference for Arab Muslims is because my main, and pretty much only, contact with persons of that ethnicity has been through my friend Omar. I met Omar through a mutual friend three years ago. He is a Palestinian Muslim attending NCSU who I immediately clicked with. He is incredibly intelligent, hardworking, and ambitious. He majored in aeronautical engineering and I would always get heated feelings when he told me stories about how his nationality prevented him from seizing the opportunities that were due to him because of his hard work and diligence. I have lost touch with Omar during the past year, but I still think of him fondly along with his Arab friends that I met. I think the only fault I ever associated with Omar was that of smoking--which is just something I don't like--but I never considered him in too negative of a light when he would smoke hookah. I think that I associated it with his cultural background rather than as a pointless habit.
Interestingly enough, I think that Omar's strengths and kindness are most likely what led to my IAT results. It's amazing how one person can impact your mental conceptions for an entire group of people, but when I was taking the test he popped into my head and I thought hard about getting the categorizations right because I hoped my results would not show a preference toward "other people." If they had, I would have not only felt that I had let Omar down in some way, but also that I unjustly judged a group of people. As it turns out, I may need to do further investigation into my perceptions of "other people."
I chose to take the test concerning Arabs/Muslims because the book we read focusing on this ethnic group in diversity class, "How Does it Feel to be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America," caught my attention the most out of any reading we've done thus far. The test began by asking some basic questions about whether or not I judge Arab Muslims, how I would rate my preference for Arab Muslims vs. other people, etc. Then it provided me with a list of terms for four categories: Good, Bad, Arab-Muslim, and Other People. The good and bad categories were mainly emotion words, such as happy and angry respectively, and the people categories consisted of Arab-Muslim names vs. other names. Then I went through a series of quick identifications where I had to categorize the words into their respective categories. It started out easy with Good vs. Bad and Arab-Muslim vs. Other People, but then required a bit more brain power as these respective categories were criss-crossed, into Good and Arab-Muslim vs. Bad and Other People for an example.
As I was doing these categorizations as quickly as I could, I noticed that I got a few more of the Other People selections wrong in comparison to Arab-Muslim. However, as I had never taken an IAT before I went in not knowing the consequences of my actions; I just tried to concentrate and get them all right in order to avoid the little red "x" that occurs when you miss one. It's in my nature to try and get as many things right as possible, and that's how I approached this test. I could even tell my hands were sweating a little because I was nervous about getting them all right.
My result from the test was a bit surprising to me, it said that I had a preference for Arab Muslims compared to other people. This was not a bias that I was aware of. When I was reading the names of "Other People" that belonged in that category, I noticed that they were still mainly names that I associated in my head with the label "ethnic names" like Takuyo and Ernesto, rather than popular Anglo names like Robert. But that was really my only observation and these results make me wonder if there was something about those names in particular that made me biased against "other people." The results also made me reconsider my attitudes toward Arab Muslims in search of the root behind this test result.
I think that the main reason I show preference for Arab Muslims is because my main, and pretty much only, contact with persons of that ethnicity has been through my friend Omar. I met Omar through a mutual friend three years ago. He is a Palestinian Muslim attending NCSU who I immediately clicked with. He is incredibly intelligent, hardworking, and ambitious. He majored in aeronautical engineering and I would always get heated feelings when he told me stories about how his nationality prevented him from seizing the opportunities that were due to him because of his hard work and diligence. I have lost touch with Omar during the past year, but I still think of him fondly along with his Arab friends that I met. I think the only fault I ever associated with Omar was that of smoking--which is just something I don't like--but I never considered him in too negative of a light when he would smoke hookah. I think that I associated it with his cultural background rather than as a pointless habit.
Interestingly enough, I think that Omar's strengths and kindness are most likely what led to my IAT results. It's amazing how one person can impact your mental conceptions for an entire group of people, but when I was taking the test he popped into my head and I thought hard about getting the categorizations right because I hoped my results would not show a preference toward "other people." If they had, I would have not only felt that I had let Omar down in some way, but also that I unjustly judged a group of people. As it turns out, I may need to do further investigation into my perceptions of "other people."
No comments:
Post a Comment