Researchers believe IAT tests reveal attitudes that people would be unwilling to state publicly, or might not even be aware of on a conscious level.Īcross all the experiments, 61 percent of white participants associated white people more with "human" and Black people more with "animal."Īn even greater number - 69 percent of white participants - associated white participants more with humans and Asians more with animals, and the same result occurred for white people taking a white-Hispanic test. The idea is that easier pairings, as measured by faster key responses, are more strongly associated in the mind than difficult pairings, as measured by slower responses. The research relied on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a tool developed in the 1990s and now widely used in the field.Ī computer-based measure, it tests the strength of associations between two concepts - for example Black and white people or gay and straight people - and two attributes like good or bad. Throughout history, the dehumanization of other races has been used as a pretext for unequal treatment, ranging from police brutality all the way to genocide. "The biggest takeaway for me is that we're still grappling in a new form with sentiments that have been around for centuries," first author Kirsten Morehouse, a PhD student at Harvard University, told AFP. If there's one thing we should all be able to agree on, it's that all human beings belong to the same species, Homo sapiens.īut a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on Monday has found a yawning gap between what people claim to believe and what they actually hold true.Ī team from Harvard and Tufts gathered data from more than 60,000 subjects who took part in 13 experiments that tested their implicit biases.Īn overwhelming majority - over 90 percent - explicitly stated that white people and non-white people are equally human.īut on an implicit measure, white US participants, as well as white participants from other countries, consistently associated the attribute "human" (as opposed to "animal") with their own group more than other racial groups.Ĭonversely, Black, Asian and Hispanic participants showed no such bias, equally associating their own group and white people with "human."
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