The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an amazingly simple way to uncover if and how strong your implicit biases may be. For example, you could test if you have a bias on gender roles (as in the sketch), race, religion or in fact any attitudes you may have. You could forget about reading this and simply go take the Implicit Association Test online now and you’ll get the idea and perhaps surprise yourself.

In the example I gave in the sketch, you could see how strong your biases are for traditional gender roles by measuring the difference in time it takes to sort first career words towards men and home and family words towards women, and then sorting the other way around.

It’s fascinating, and a little uncomfortable, to see your implicit attitudes so clearly come to light. Don’t forget to try taking a test.

The Implicit Association Test

One of my favourite psychological tests. Definitely worth taking 2 mins right now to give it a go. Time yourself to say the colour of the word (not what the word says) for the first set. Then repeat for the second. Observe interference at work.

The Stroop test

Classic rule of thumb from Jakob Nielsen. Probably the most useful corollary is if you can afford 15 tests, tests 5 users 3 times each and iterate the design in between.

Sketchplanations tagged with testing