----- Original Message ---- From: Philip Pilkington <pilkingtonphil at gmail.com>
Then they proceed to ask you questions through the standard procedure of a questionnaire. Unfortunately, as most social-psychologists have come to realise, when people are asked questions they tend to self-reflect on them and put forward what they would like to think about themselves (what Freud called their "ideal-ego" - which, incidentally, isn't helped by telling the participants in bold print that they're being observed). Thus if most people are asked whether they would have tortured someone under the Nazi regime they self-reflect and say "no". But if they are put under experimental conditions, they tend to do the complete opposite of what they thought they would do.
Funny that the authors recognise that people "don't always 'know their minds'" and then go on to write such an epitemologically dubious test. Have these people never even heard about focus groups (especially those that try to manipulate swing-voters - no need to study psychology, just ask your last Democrat president about that one...), free association or the infamous Milgram experiments?
[WS:] I think the test is rubbish for a reason different than the psychological theory about human cognition. In this particular case, I believe, that theory is is that the first response is a more accurate refection of our "emotional intelligence" - which really drives our behavior than a "reasoned" or perhaps "rationalized" response. AFAIK, there is evidence supporting such a theory.
My point, however, is that the test they designed to test racial prefrence conflates several different things that have nothing to do with racial preferences, such as psychomotor coordination necessary to hit the right keys with speed and precision, or the ability to function under specific type of stress e.g. induced by being timed.
I do very poorly on psychomotor coordination (that is why I can only type using the two-finger method) and equally poorly under timing-induced stress. My results showed no racial preference and a *slight* preference for Obama over McCain. I was laughing my ass off, because I expected strong preference for Obama and a slight preference for whites - which one is to expect as most people have natural preference for their "own" kind of people simply because they are more familar with them. It is obvious when one consider everyday interaction, such as dating. People generally date with their "own kind" not because they are racists but because they go for the more familiar in situations of uncertainty.
My partner, who has no psychomotor coordination problems and performs better than myself under stress (as most females do) scored strong preference for blacks and no preference for Obama/Mccain. She again laughed her ass off at the results. This makes me suspicious that any white who did not hesitate to associate blacks with "good words" on the test was scored as to "prefer" blacks - on the assumption that a "natural" or perhaps "neutral" reaction would be to go with the stereotypes. If so, that is rubbish.
Wojtek