An eye-opening self assessment of buried prejudice will measure your personal development progress in acceptance of others.
Are you biased, bigoted, judgmental, and distrusting of people not like you?
I suspect most of you voice a vigorous and immediate no! to that question.
If you're serious about personal development, you've probably given much thought to your beliefs. Perhaps you'll admit you grew up with family and neighborhood beliefs about "them." But you probably feel that you've moved on to broader acceptance of other people, especially those who look, act, or believe differently.
Subconscious Prejudice
Don't be so sure. A research project dubbed Project Implicit finds that most of us have implicit and deeply held beliefs which bias us in favor of or against certain groups.
Social psychologists Mahzarin Banaji of the Harvard faculty and the University of Washington's Anthony Greenwald joined with Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia to establish Project Implicit on the Web in 1998. Since then visitors have completed 3 million demonstration tests that measure the implicit bias people have at a subconscious level.
Take a Self Assessment
To measure the presence or absence of your own subconscious prejudice, take a demonstration run on the Implicit Association Test. There are a variety of demonstrations, measuring implicit bias toward/against other races, genders, career associations, and more. Pick one or two.
I predict you'll find the results eye-opening, disturbing, and frustrating. I did.
