Better The Devil You Don't Know?

Here it is, the start of a new year, one that I expect to be very big for me personally. The experiences and knowledge I picked up in 2009 really began to build momentum in my life last year, but I think in 2010 they will really begin to take hold and propel me toward my goals. By the end of this year, I may even arrive at those goals.

I've spent the first day of this new year refining some of my investment tracking tools (much easier to do when the markets are all closed, by the way). I've also been reading up on those topics and other things. One place in particular I've spent time at today has been the blog of Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

In a post he wrote entitled, Rethinking Investing: Common-Sense Rules for Uncommon Times, I saw a link to something called the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT) for race. Tim wrote of it:

Take the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT) for race as many times as you like. I’m not a betting man, but I’ll bet you come up as racist, regardless of race.

Curious, I took the test. It takes about five minutes to complete and features a series of word and image assocations, for which you are to hit the appropriate keys as fast as you can without making mistakes in order to sort what you are presented with into set categories.

I guess Tim is right, because my results came back indicating that I have an automatic preference for certain people. 48% of respondents have a strong automatic preference for white people, which is what I am, but I fell into a group comprising 6% of all respondents who have a slight automatic preference for black people.

I found this a bit confusing at first, until I realized it may come down to my tendency to suspend judgment about that which I have no experience with, or less experience with relative to something else that is similar, combined with my optimistic tendencies toward the unfamiliar and a long memory in regard to all things injurious. Basically, it occurred to me that being white and having lived in majority white communities my entire life, the people I've interacted with the most have of course been other white people. It follows that the people I've most often been screwed over by are... white people!

Maybe subconsciously I don't regard black people as being as much of a threat as other whites because I don't interact with blacks as much? (And, when I do, the majority of the time the interactions have been positive.) Possibly - the results page notes that approximately half of black Americans have a strong automatic preference for white people, so maybe negative interactions with others of one's own racial group, presumably the people one will be around most often, leads to an assumption that unfamiliar people outside of the group might be better. Or maybe the test is bunk and these results are random and/or meaningless? Who knows.

Try it out, see what you come up with.