The Project Implicit Test Paper

Although it may only be buried deep in the subconscious and implicit, nearly all people hold prejudiced views towards a specific race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, etc. However, because it is not obvious on the surface, many deny that they feel this way, but it is through tests like the Project Implicit at Harvard that true beliefs can be uncovered. The particular study on Race involved answering numerous questions about personal beliefs towards African Americans and European Americans, as well as an exercise involving word associations. At the conclusion, the participant receives results stating if he or she has a slight, moderate, strong, or no preferences at all towards one specific race, providing interesting, and often surprising, insights.
While there has been a drop in the number of people who do not endorse racism and prejudice today, it is still very common in society, both implicitly and explicitly. This has been proven through behavioral experiments such as those related to seating
First, participants may exercise prejudiced behavior towards their outgroup, whether implicitly or explicitly, as they do not share membership and feel they are “vastly different” from themselves. Therefore, by associating negative words with the outgroup, it shows that the participant does have tendencies to be prejudiced. Furthermore, since prejudiced behavior protects self-esteem, people tend to associate the positive characteristics and words with their ingroup and the opposite with the negative ones. So, by being able to more quickly assign negative characteristics to those in the outgroup on the test, participants are implicitly bolstering their own self-esteem. Finally, this study proves that when conducting job interviews and reviewing applications in the workplace, employers may implicitly discriminate against other races or members of a different