Your implicit association testing have no effects on me

I don't have to explain implicit association testing to y'all, right? It's when those clever-clog psychologists use a web-based test to see how quickly you associate various pictures with either pleasant or unpleasant words to see how you really feel about the subject of the pictures.

As it's election season, said clever-clog psychologists from Harvard rigged up a election'08 edition of the implicit association test. Go take it, won't take more than 10 minutes.

Both Amanda and Jeff took the test and found their revealed preferences to square with their actual stated preferences. Good for them. Mine was rather hilariously off. Hillary came first, ahead of Barack Obama, my actual preferred candidate. But what's really funny is Mike Huckabee, the guy I would least likely to see in the White House, did just as well as Obama. McCain came in dead last.

Possible interpretations:

(1) I am secretly an manchurian-candidate type plant sent by the Evangelicals to infiltrate the liberal blogisphere.

(2) Huckabee, more than any of the other candidates, concentrates on propagating a homey, folksy image. Sure, he is a utter religious nutter and I would consider a Huckabee administration a disaster of epic magnitude, but that doesn't mean I don't think he's a nice person.

Sure would be interesting to see some aggregate results of different demographics from this test. A pollster tool for the future?

Or perhaps, with some modifications, the most awesome push-polling tool evar.

Say it ain't so. But how?

Human beings are stupid in interesting ways:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.[snip]

...once an idea has been implanted in people's minds, it can be difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce it.

Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.

Basically, until people start paying attention, we're doomed as a democracy. When information is absorbed passively in a peripheral manner, strong denials of untruths might have a counterproductive effect of strengthening the untruth instead of debunking it.

This reminds me of that Far Side cartoon where the exasperated owner is telling off his dog, saying "Ginger, you bad dog, if you keep misbehaving like this then you won't be getting any more yummy food..." and all the dog can hear is "Ginger...yummy food." Fill in analogous example with "Saddam" and "9/11" here.

An interview with the reporter who wrote the article above, Shankar Vedantam, from On The Media:



By the way, a collection of Vedantam's Department of Human Nature columns can be found here.