How well do you know your own mind? Admittedly we all do silly things now and then but many people probably reckon they know their inner belief system fairly well. But perhaps you have unconscious mental associations that not only are you not aware of, but also might have a genuine effect in your day-to-day interactions and behaviour.

Imagine the following task: You are given a piece of paper with people's names on. You have to go down the list as quickly as possible and assign each name to one of two categories; male or female. Simple huh?

Moving on: repeat the test. This time the words are either to do with having a career (e.g. "salary", "employer") or having a family ("baby", "marriage"). Again, you must quickly assign them as being either a career related word, or a family related word.

Let's ramp the complexity up a bit. Now it's time to combine those two tasks. There are again two categories: "male or career" words and "female or family" words. That's not to say that there is anything related between males and careers, it's just whenever you see a word to do with either a man, or a career, you should assign it to that category. Move down the list nice and quickly, assign away.

Lastly: do it again. However this time the categories are either "male or family" or "female or career". Psychologists doing this experiment - called the Implicit Association Test - find that most people find the last task there harder to do; it takes them longer and they may make more mistakes. The reasoning here is that it is breaking a strong subconscious association the majority of people have about how men are usually the career-oriented breadwinners, and women stay at home with families. This same association is evident for the majority of people no matter what order they do the tests in, and reoccurs when they take them again (presumably as long as they don't cheat via deliberately performing especially badly one assumes).

If you would like to try these sort of tests out then you can get the computer to read your mind at Project Implicit. They presently have 14 sample tests to try out on numerous topics. Using the wonders of the web, it will give you a computerised test and let you know what associations you may have, after determining via a questionnaire what you think your explicit associations are.

Most famous according to Malcolm Gladwell in Blink is the Race implicit association test. Here, the experiment is exactly the same as the one described above, except the categories are "European American or African American" and "Good or bad". Thousands of iterations of this experiment have shown that most (American) people are better at assigning pictures and words to what is essentially the "Good and White" vs "Bad and Black" category grouping than doing the same task with the groups being "Good and Black" and "Bad and White". Perhaps counter-intuitively, many black people taking the test have an equally strong association between "Bad and Black" and "Good and White" as the average white person does.

Gladwell quite reasonably explains this as follows: "We live in North America, where we are surrounded every day with cultural messages linking white with good. 'You don't choose to make positive associations with the dominant group,' says Mahzarin Banaji, who teaches psychology at Harvard University...'But you are required to. All around you, that group is being paired with good things. You open the newspaper and you turn on the television, and you can't escape it.'"

How to avoid unpleasant and unfair associations and the consequential unintended prejudice? Well, on the basis of the above, we'd have to start by changing how the newspapers are written, bring equality into the images beamed into society through television and so on. The associations should never be written into society's mindset in the first place, but seeing as it's too late for most of us here's what the Harvard guys recommend:

"...seek experiences that could undo or reverse the patterns of experience that could have created the unwanted preference. But this is not always easy to do. A more practical alternative may be to remain alert to the existence of the undesired preference, recognizing that it may intrude in unwanted fashion into your judgments and actions."

If any avid readers are interested in a big pile of journal papers and the like on this topic, get yourself over to Project Implicit's research papers pages. For questions on the validity of the methodology, the Poorhouse would like to recommend the attached paper from Greenwald et al.

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwarz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464-1480.