Understanding Implicit Bias

I decided to take the age implicit association test. The test measures what an old or young person measures associations between an old/young person and when evaluating good and bad descriptions. For example, an implicit preference for Young people relative to Old people means that you are faster to sort words when ‘Young people’ and ‘Good’ share a button relative to when ‘Old people’ and ‘Good’ share a button. I work in healthcare and work with elderly people. Its hard to say that I associated young people with “good” describing words and older people with “bad describing words.” I mostly had to remember what things to push “E” for and what things to push “I” for. I wasn’t unconsciously pressing things and associated them with what I would relate to. I only really focused on facial characteristics of an older person and facial characteristics of a younger person whether it be wrinkles, sagging skin or high cheek bones and manicured eyebrows. Once you get through all of the pictures you can see what the test thinks and then memorize it from there if you get the answers wrong. The validity and reliability of this kind of selection process is not very good. It doesn’t matter if a person is considered young or old but the best candidate for the job. One thing to solve implicit bias is to focus on seeing people as individuals with lots of ideas, skills, and knowledge. One thing this test taught me is that I am doing a good job in this section. Another thing people can do is change their perspective and introduce themselves to more people who are different than them, such as interacting with older people if you are young and vice versa. In the workforce, applicants can choose to not say their age when applying or companies simply do not need to ask for it. Working with elderly people in healthcare, they will surprise you with how young they are!