I was watching an episode of Alan Alda's Scientific American Frontiers the other day and it was all about hidden motives. [If you've never watched it, this is a great little PBS show where they study all kinds of cool things like "cool vs uncool" and "what faces are attractive" and stuff like that. Alan Alda is usually the guniea pig who gets into an MRI machine and looks at stuff and then gets his brain waves interpreted. It's cool if you are a science geek.]
Anyway, this episode was about hidden motives and he was at Harvard with experts who are studying implicit bias in people. They take a series of tests using a computer test where you sort keywords and your reaction time to the sorting indicates your hidden bias. The examples on the show were serious topics like gender and race. It was fascinating. Anyway, they mentioned that you can go to the Project Implicit website and participate in the research project yourself. Of course, I went right away to be a research subject.
Guess what they evaluated me on?
Kobe vs. Shaq
How hilarious! It says they have about 100 pairs of things that they test and you get a pair randomly assigned for your test. (You can take many tests but I've only done one so far.)
As it turns out, I have a strong implicit preference for Shaq over Kobe.
It was fun -- you should go check it out.
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