The third step is to view a series of flashing words and names, putting the black names and the bad words in one category while grouping the white names with the good words. The clincher comes in the fourth step, which is identical to the third step but asks you to group bad words with white names and good words with black names. This task, identifying black with good, takes most people much longer and feels like more of a struggle than identifying black with bad, even though the two tasks, objectively speaking, are equal in difficulty. Both researchers admit that even they didn't ace the test. One might expect African-Americans to do better on the test than whites, but so far, that hasn't been the case, Banaji says, although research is ongoing.
Blacks do, however, show more variation in their results than do whites.
Try It for Yourself Scientific research continues, but grad student Nosek helped the researchers create the two Web sites as a way to make the test available to the public. And in a very real sense, that's what this technique does. It takes something that is ordinarily operating at an unconscious level and puts it into your hands as you're responding on the keyboard in a way that's potent enough so that you can actually be aware that these associations are influencing your behavior. But being aware doesn't necessarily mean being in control. Greenwald says that because these associations are automatic and unconscious, most of us aren't even aware we make them.