Innate Reactions

Our last class was very interesting concerning subliminal messages and other stimuli to create some sort of atypical response. For instance, I was surprised that thinking of old people made you walk slower or thinking of what a professor looked like made you score higher on an exam, placement test, etc. Sitting in class I was reminded of an experiment my Greek professor encouraged us to do last year.

Last year ACU had a speaker on “White Privilege” that sparked a lot of conversation and controversy on campus. One of the things this particular professor told us was that we must recognize how we were raised and where we come from in order to fully recognize our own biases concerning race. This recognition will help us deal with our automatic responses and hopefully move forward in such a way as to change ourselves and others for the better. We cannot pretend our past doesn’t shape us. To help us better understand what he was saying, he encouraged us to take a test online. The results were confidential and not revealed to anyone other than the test taker.

The test paired certain good words and bad words with an African/African-American face or a Caucasian face. The test taker was supposed to match the terms as quickly as possible to the “correct” terms. One time through bad words were paired with Caucasians and good words with African Americans while a second time through did the opposite. The pairings were chosen randomly. When I took it, Caucasian was paired with good the first time through and with bad the second time through. A rating was given after the testing based on the time it took to match the questions and the number that were paired incorrectly. The rating was made by comparing the test takers 2 scores. It was not based on comparing the test taker to a neutral group.

I was not surprised with my own results. I grew up in a highly racist family from the south east. My father still flies the Confederate flag and considers Arlington National Cemetery in DC to be stolen property from the North. Though I hold vastly different views from my parents (more particularly my father), I knew my automatic responses would be less than great. However, I am grateful to my professor for the suggestion. I am now aware how strong my innate reactions despite my own opinions. It is interesting how much there is “unconscious” that we are not aware of. I wouldn’t consider myself crazy about Freud’s particular analysis of the unconscious, but I do agree with him that it is important. We must know how we’ve been shaped (maybe more of a behaviorist mindset) before we can live how we believe is right.