Implicit Association Test (IAT) Featured Task: 2008 Election

The implicit-association test (IAT) is a measure within social psychology designed to detect the strength of a person's automatic association between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory.  During the 2008 election there was a version that tested your racial biases by comparing photos of blacks and whites, and Obama and McCain.  It was posted to a message board on October 31, 2008.  On November 1, I wrote:

The test seems to determine how well you are with hand-eye coordination or thinking quickly rather than your racial preferences.

Someone else wrote:

I have slight auto prefs for white (some of the pictures were not so easy - but I didn't get a lot of Xs)

I responded with:

I agree. There was one picture that I thought was a white man, but I got an X, so after that I knew he was black. I did get more wrong in the black vs white section than the political one. I wonder if color pictures would be more accurate.

This was my comment in the original thread that Phantom mentioned this:

In college for a sociology class I took the implicit test and it showed I had a slight preference to whites.

Here is an interesting post from Dr. Helen (wife of Instapundit) in 2006:
http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2006/01/another-anti-republican-study.html

My results were:

Slight preference for blacks over whites and no difference between Obama and McCain. Those actually surprise me (given the different race result I had previously and because I am strongly in support of McCain). I did try really hard to get the right answers, I don't know if that means anything.

I'm quite certain that I am more biased towards blacks. I'm afraid of doing something offensive.

A few people responded to that last sentence.

First person:

That's the idea. Most of us have been groomed to feel just that way. It's called intimidation.

Second person (responding to both of us):

That's right. That's why we have, "If OBB doesn't win. it's because of Racism". That's why we have "If OBB doesn't win there'll be a 2nd Civil War" threads. Intimidation and guilt piled as high as they can.

But we can't have "If McCain doesn't win that's Racist" or "If McCain doesn't win there'll be a Civil War" - that's just not PC. 

It's all BS.

Third person (in response to me and the first person):

Which [intimidation and PC in general] is scandalous, and indicates an evil living. Thus, shun it.