- This task will take about five minutes to complete.
I'm gonna be either racist or not racist in five minutes.
- [Voiceover] If someone asked you what you thought
about a particular group of people
you could probably answer them, right?
Most of us believe that we understand our own brains.
We believe that we know how we see the world.
But what if our brains were holding on
to a whole other set of subconscious opinions?
Opinions that were just under the surface,
that we didn't even know we had?
Psychologists call these, implicit attitudes.
Implicit attitudes are defined as positive and negative
evaluations that occur outside of our conscious
awareness and control.
The media, our friends, everyone we meet,
our brain pays attention to all the subtle messages
in our life and tries to make sense of it all,
creating our implicit attitudes.
In order to measure these subconscious attitudes,
psychologists created the
Implicit Association Test or IAT.
The test has been taken online by over 2,000,000 people.
We asked six people to take the IAT
about race for the very first time.
- I am actually pretty excited about taking this test.
I have no doubts that I have some sort
of racist tendencies like everybody else on the planet.
- I'm afraid of where I grew up that it's going to
reflect on the test, even though I don't want it to.
- I don't think I'm racist but this test
might tell me that I am.
I'd like to know so I can,
I don't know, change my ways.
- Ugh, okay.
- They're just presenting me with small amounts
of faces and asking me to identify
if they are basically white or black people.
- Dangerous.
- Is this racial profiling?
- I'm mostly looking at the noses.
- The test feels a little weird.
- It's making me uncomfortable.
- I (bleeped) up already.
- It's weird because there's like the words
are also associated with the pictures.
European is also inside of bad right now.
- The left side is African-American or bad,
the right side is European-American or good.
- I feel like it's trying to trick my mind into thinking
that these words are associated with these faces.
- I feel like I'm getting incepted.
- So weird.
- Oh, I'm getting a lot wrong.
- What the (bleep)?
This is mind games.
(sigh)
- I can feel my heartbeat going faster
and faster and faster.
- I don't know why I have to think so hard to do this.
- Oh, I'm getting really angry.
- (Bleep).
- This is exactly what society tells you.
- It's making me very upset (laughs).
- Ha, got my results.
- Your automatic preference may be described
as slight, moderate, strong, or little to no preference.
- Your data suggests a slight automatic preference
for African-American compared to European-American.
- Your data suggests a strong automatic preference
for European-American compared to African-American.
- Your data suggests a slight automatic preference
for African-American compared to European-American.
- Your data suggests a slight automatic preference
for European-American compared to African-American.
- Your data suggests a moderate automatic preference
for African-American compared to European-American.
- Your data suggests a slight automatic preference
for European-American compared to African-American.
- I thought I was gonna be like neutral maybe.
- I'm not surprised by the results,
but I'm also not happy with them.
- I'm African-American, all my friends
or the majority, African-American.
My parents are African-American so
I feel like my preference is for what
I've seen almost every single day of my life.
- For me, figuring out where my sympathies lie
really is so complicated.
- Even in kindergarten or elementary school
white is like heavenly and angels.
Black is always associated with coal or darkness.
So I'm not surprised that that's an automatic response
because we've been so conditioned to think that way.
- Even if you do have a strong preference
for one or the other it makes no difference
if you go through your life open-hearted
and open-minded and just sensitive to other people.
- Man, I don't know.
It's been pretty emotional.
- It opens up dialogue that definitely needs to happen now.
- Even if you don't deal with race in your life,
a lot of people do.
- It's good to be asked,
"Well, why don't you feel as comfortable?"
and maybe we can change that.
- Don't be scared of race.
It's there, everybody should be talking about it.
You don't have to be angry and you don't have to be upset
and we don't have to talk about who's got power over who.
It's time.
(suspenseful music)