Cameron Sandmire
Out of the list of tests provided, I decided to test my bias on disability. The reason I chose this is because I have been taught to feel empathy toward disabled people and I wanted to see if that held up. The test was difficult and challenged not my beliefs, but how quickly I was able to respond to associations between good, bad, disabled, and abled. Although I felt like my brain had melted by the end of the test, I learned a lot.
The results I got indicated a moderate automatic preference towards abled people over physically disabled people. This shocked me for a lot of reasons, especially because I would never guess that I have an implicit bias towards that specific group of people. In the article “How to Think about Implicit Bias” they say “Most measures in psychology, from aptitude tests to personality scales, are useful for predicting how groups will respond on average, not forecasting how particular individuals will behave.” This resonated with me because I do not believe that an unconscious bias would determine action or treatment in an unfavorable manor towards a disabled person. By this I mean that I always try to treat disabled people as kindly as possible without being offensively kind because life is harder for them and I want no part in making it even harder. Where the bias comes in is that initial feeling long before you act, but who you are is determined by what happens in-between that underlying initial bias and action. I think to counteract any implicit bias one has you must be patient enough to analyze the person and situation before speaking or acting.
Sources:
Payne, K., Niemi, L., & Doris, J. M. (2018, March 27). How to think about implicit bias. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-think-about-implicit-bias/
Be Better Blog. (2021). Understanding implicit bias — and how to work through it. bhgrecareer.com. https://bhgrecareer.com/bebetterblog/implicit-bias/