365 days: Nature’s 10

Nature:

When Brian Nosek was a graduate student in experimental psychology, he started working on the implicit-association test, which reveals people’s unconscious prejudices with the push of a button. Tap right every time a male name appears on a screen, for example, and left for a female name. That’s easy — but add some stereotypically male or female roles into the mix and things get interesting. Even the most liberal minds will sometimes stall when asked to press the same button for the word ‘executive’ and for the name ‘Susan’.

The tests are challenging, informative and kind of fun. So in 1998 Nosek convinced his mentors, who had developed the test, to put it online. It was a success: about a million people per year now take the test for research, corporate training and other reasons. “It really spread the word about what unconscious bias is,” says Betsy Levy Paluck, a social psychologist at Princeton University, New Jersey.

Read the whole story: Nature