5 Minutes 'til Judgements

I was just reading Nicholas Kristof's latest column in the NYTimes. He's talking about the results of implicit association tests that look at how people judge things as American vs. foreign. Turns out they're not really very good at it (Tony Blair beats Barack Obama and Kate Winslet beats Lucy Lui). Remember when another one of these tests was being used during the primaries to claim that people weren't going to vote for Obama because he's black? The point of that one was that most Americans (both black and white) subconsciously have negative associations with black faces, even if they don't think they do:

Want to know how I did on it? After hitting some keys for 5 minutes while being shown 'positive' words, 'negative' words, pictures of white faces, and pictures of black faces, I fell into that top category: Strong automatic preference for White people compared to Black people. It wasn't exactly what I wanted or expected to be told. So I took another test, this one supposed to judge my positive and negative associations with McCain and Obama:

This made me feel better about myself, and at the same time much worse about the usefulness of these tests. I went back to try the Black vs. White one again and miraculously had become slightly less (unconsciously) racist over the course of 15 minutes: