Implicit Bias and You. And Me. And Everyone..

[The Grand Nudger]

Agreed Irrational.

@Rhythm, yes of course someone could game the system.  A sociopath can sometimes fool a psychiatrist face to face. Should we dismiss the results of all psychological tests because they CAN be gamed, or because they are occasionally off?

If we can plainly identify both how and why they can be and have been gamed, or that no one even needs to -attempt- to game them to get uninformative results..yes, absolutely.

Again, it's not a hard science, it isn't like mixing chemical x with chemical y produces compound z.  We are still learning how to make better tests like this, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.  

Is there a baby in the bathwater?  That's the problem with personality tests as a category, no matter what we call them.  

Often, psychological tests rely on people doing their honest best.  So if you are honest and not trying to game it, then I think the test is fairly reliable.  It may be off a bit one way or the other, but if you do your best and are NOT trying to game it, it won't, for instance, show you have no bias when you have a very strong bias.

Doing my honest best can, along the lines I've described to you, hide rather than expose any bias. Simply because my "honest best" may be more suitable to the test format than someone else's.

But anyway, this is still sidestepping the main issue, which is how to avoid passing on biases like this to our kids, and how to help eliminate them in ourselves.  I realize, for instance, I tell my daughter she is pretty all the time, when I probably should probably instead tell her shes capable or smart instead when I feel like boosting her confidence.

She's probably pretty, though, right?  So tell her all of the above.  I rack my brain over this one, honestly.  I've been watching my daughters grow up...and ofc they;re still very little....but they don;t seem to define themselves along any of the lines I'm most often focused on.  I've made a conscious effort, for example, not to promote or focus on gender stereotypes when I compliment them, or engage in their interests with them.  For some odd reason, though, one of my daughters is noticeably more interested in painting her nails than in building a fishtank with me, even though she loves fishtanks.  The other, despite - to some extent, enforcing those stereoptypes before it really hit my radar..is just a born tomboy, it seems.

I mean, I say this, but tommorrow it may be the tomboy that wants me to braid her hair and play dolls....and the nailpainter who wants to shoot her sisters pretty pink bb gun. From where I sit they're both movable puzzleboxes.