For this blog assignment, I chose to take the “age” category of the Implicit Attitude Test. The results of my test concluded that my responses suggested a strong automatic preference for young people over old people. I found this interesting because I never really categorized whether I like young or old people more, I thought I was pretty neutral between the two categories; so it was interesting to see these results. I believe implicit bias could impact the reliability or validity of a selection process in a few different ways. 

The first way being in a managers sense, while recruiting and selecting potential employees I feel that managers have an implicit bias towards younger people, especially in the US. This is due to seeing them as having higher work potential; in ways such as being able to work faster and more efficiently, being able to be with the company longer, and being able to advance into upper level positions. I also feel that managers have an implicit bias towards young people because they haven’t been in the workforce that long compared to the older generations, which managers could see as an opportunity to persuade and lure them into working for their company. 

One thing you could do to try to prevent or counteract these implicit biases is consider the older generations as being more experienced. Older generations likely have a lot more experience within different companies and positions which allows them to implement different strategies into the new company they were to work for. According to the article How to Think about ‘Implicit Bias’, “One reason people on both the right and the left are skeptical of implicit bias might be pretty simple: it isn’t nice to think we aren’t very nice. It would be comforting to conclude, when we don’t consciously entertain impure intentions, that all of our intentions are pure. Unfortunately, we can’t conclude that: many of us are more biased than we realize.”

Citation:

Payne, K. (2018, March 27). How to think about ‘implicit bias’. Scientific American. Retrieved April 28, 2022, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-think-about-implicit-bias/