The implicit association test, it has been around for about 15 years and it has become a quite popular measure that many psychologists are using in their research. Psychology has its origins in Germany. German psychologists for the very first time began to measure the mind. And that was in the late 1800s. The way they did that is by asking people questions.
They would say, tell me, how does this color look to you? Describe the red here. They had people introspect. They had people reflect on a prior episode and report back, what is their memory, what is their perception, how do they reason about it, using language. For a hundred years, that's how psychologists have largely measured the contents of what's in the mind, the mechanisms by which the mind works.
works. But in the last, I would say, 30 years or so, there's been a slow shift towards trying to find better measures, sometimes measures that do not ask the person to say anything, but instead to respond very quickly or to do something by putting two things together. And these new measures will call indirect measures of cognition.
We will not ask you, how do you feel about something? We will say to you, I'll flash a word on a screen and you have to tell me very quickly. whether this word, second word, is a word or not a word. And now we can measure and see that the first word that you saw influences how you respond to the second word.
These indirect measures have been around for a while. And the one that I'll describe to you is one that was invented by Professor Anthony Greenwald at the University of Washington in the mid-1990s. And here's how the test goes. So I'll give you a simple little description. Imagine you have a set of playing cards.
And I ask you to sort the cards. Put anything that's a black card to one side and anything that's a red card to the other side. Sort. Black, red, black, red, black, black, black, red, black.
Okay. How long does it take you to do this? It should take you about 20 seconds to run through one deck of cards to do this.
Very easy. No mistakes. Takes very short time to do.
Now imagine I say to you, if you see anything that is a diamond or a spade, You put it to the right. One red and one black card. Anything that is a club or a heart you put to the left side. Now you sort and now you go, oh diamond and what was it again you say and you can't remember.
If I measure how long you take to do that it will take you almost almost twice as long to do it. Not at all as easy as the first one and you will make many mistakes. Why?
It's very simple the answer. In the first case the two are naturally connected to each other. Diamonds and hearts are both red and that's their connector.
Spades and clubs are both black that is their connector. We have no such connector in the other case so it takes us much longer to do that. Take this as an example and now let us move this forward to something much more interesting than playing cards. Now let me tell you that I'm going to give you Faces of people who are dark-skinned or faces of people who are light-skinned.
You have to put black faces to one side, white faces to one side. But also, I give you the meaning of things. are good and bad.
Imagine if I say to you, here are some good things. A word like love, peace, joy, friend, sunshine, success. These are all good things.
Now let me give you another set of things. They're bad things. Words like devil, bomb, war, vomit, awful, failure.
These are all bad things. Now, imagine that you're sitting in front of a computer, and I tell you, whenever a face shows up, decide, is it a black face or a white face? If it is white, press this key. If it is black, press this key. Easy.
Now, you will also get words and faces. If the word is good, like love, or the face is white, you should press this key. the right key.
If the word is bad, like devil, and if the face is black, you should press the left key. Easy. This turns out to be very easy for many people to do. But if I now say switch it. Now, if you see a black face or a good word, press the right key.
If you see a face that's white and a bad word, you press the left key. Most of us, myself included, we will slow down when we have to do this. this tell us?
It tells us that in our minds, there is a concept like black and white, like there are many concepts, straight and gay, older and younger person. People who are rich and poor, people who are Russian and American, these are all different categories, many different religions and so on. So you can now take this test, it's called the implicit association test, and it simply measures how fast can you put black and good together compared to how fast you can put white and good together. And it takes the difference in the time and the number of mistakes you make when you do this test as a rough indicator of that idea in your mind and what attitude you have towards it.
So the implicit association test simply measures the strength of association between an attribute such as good and bad, tall and short, strong and weak, and many groups that we can imagine. Elderly and young, male and female, black and white, gay and straight, whatever it is you're interested in. That's what the test does. You can go visit the test. And take tests like this yourself.
You can just go to implicit.harvard.edu and there are many tests there. And anybody who is interested can go to I-M-P-L-I-C-I-T dot harvard dot edu and their tests are free and available to the public. You will ask many questions after you take this test. You will say, Why do you think this test is telling me about myself? That's not who I am.
I'm a good person. I don't have any bias towards people who are dark-skinned or people who are gay or people who are Jewish or whatever might be the group. But our test will actually show you that there might be a bias in your mind where you are not able to associate good equally with different kinds of groups. This should be the basis of asking questions about yourself and using these new inventions, indirect measures of the mind, to ask ourselves who are we really? How much does the culture influence what goes on inside our mind?
What can we do about this? Does it affect my behavior towards somebody I have to hire? How does a doctor treat their patient?
How does a judge make a decision about two people, one of whom who is wealthy and one of whom who is poor? So it has many such applications. It turns out that in many things our mind actually thinks in terms of binaries, that we do think about things like, you know, black and white and so on.
But... But we can ask the question, what do we do? For example, there are many different religions in the world.
So yes, again, Tony Greenwald has built a new version of this test. It's called the Brief IAT. And the Brief IAT actually is a shorter test. The test I described earlier, the implicit association test, itself takes only about four minutes to take a test.
So it's not long. But the Brief IAT is even briefer, and it has more items in it. So imagine if you wanted to know from me, hey, how much does Mazarin like Christians versus Jews versus Hindus versus Muslims versus Zoroastrians versus Baha'i? And I can go on and on with all the world's religions. We can make a test in which you can see the distance.
Maybe my own religion is up here. I like it very much. And then there's a big drop and maybe then Christianity will be here and Islam will be way down here. and Judaism may be up here because maybe I think we're closer to Jews.
Whatever the results are, we don't know. We have to test ourselves. But yes, you can do tests in which you can add multiple categories in.
What is the importance of this test for science? And the really important part about this test for science is that it gives us a measure of something that is going on in our mind that we do not know about. That's very important. If you want to understand a rock, you will not ask the rock any questions. You will cut the rock, you will open it up, and you will analyze it.
We don't know how to do that. We do not want to break people's heads and look inside their minds directly at their brain easily. I mean, and even if we looked at the brain, we cannot see much about what the mind is doing.
So these tests, their importance is that they can allow us to understand what is in our minds. as a scientific question without asking people to tell us what they think is in their minds. And sometimes what is in my mind is also what I think is in my mind. Everything's fine.
But many times, if you ask me, what is in your mind, Mazarin, I will tell you, this is in my mind. But if you perform the IAT on me, you will find an opposite answer. This becomes very interesting for science, because now we can start to ask the question, can we study this in a deeper way, so that we can know about the difference between our verbal self-reports, how do we report to somebody, and what might actually be inside our minds.
Interesting question. Would this test work in the West where we think in terms of binaries? But maybe in Asia you could say, you know, will it still work there? I would argue that it absolutely does.
We do it in Asia. We have websites that are from many different countries. So we have data from 14 million tests on the IAT from all over the world.
And what we see is that people are very naturally able to take the test because Everybody to some extent, things in terms of opposites. We have day and night, tea and coffee, you know, up and down. I mean, there are hundreds of things in our vocabulary, in our world, where binaries are very natural and very easy, and they're the same in Asia as well as here.
How can this test be improved? This test can be improved a lot, because this is just a little scratching on the surface of trying to understand... how our minds work.
It's a very useful test to us right now, but in science if we do not change and if we do not make something better then we have failed. So for us success is failure. Success is to show that what is working today is a very rough measure and in the future we will get finer and finer and better measures.
And so we are constantly looking for ways that will be better than this current test and my hope is that we will find some. that will. Just as the IAT has improved upon previous tests, hopefully somebody else will come along and show that our test is no good, that something else is better. Often I think about the medical context.
You know, we have instruments to measure our body. If you want me to say, what is your blood pressure, I can say, oh give me two minutes. I put a little instrument on my wrist and I have a pump and in two minutes I can give you two numbers and that will tell you what is my blood pressure.
And based on that number, I can live or die. I can choose to do many things with my life. Our hope is that as we get better and better instruments, and we can save more and more lives physically, likewise, in understanding the mind, if we can develop better and better techniques that will allow us to know why is it that people do what they do.
We do many things that are not good for us. We do not always act in our own self-interest. I eat a lot of fat and I eat a lot of sugar.
You know, I need to somehow understand where is this coming from. If I understand that, maybe I will be able to lead a more healthy life.