General Information

Project Implicit

Project Implicit blends basic research and educational outreach in a virtual laboratory at which visitors can examine their own hidden biases. Project Implicit is the product of research by three scientists whose work produced a new approach to understanding of attitudes, biases, and stereotypes.

The Project Implicit site (implicit.harvard.edu) has been functioning as a hands-on science museum exhibit, allowing web visitors to experience the manner in which human minds display the effects of stereotypic and prejudicial associations acquired from their socio-cultural environment.

The following provides a brief overview of the site’s functioning.

Facts about the Project Implicit web sites

  • Visitors have completed more than 4.5 million demonstration tests since 1998, currently averaging over 15,000 tests completed each week.
  • Web sites affiliated with Project Implicit have earned a variety of accolades, most notably a Webby Award in 2002.
  • Since its inception in 1998, Project Implicit has expanded from a single site with four demonstration tasks to multiple sites with capability for exploring more than a dozen different varieties of implicit bias as well as attitudes and beliefs toward social groups and politics.
  • The Project Implicit family of sites affords a unique opportunity for visitors on the web to try procedures that can reveal one’s own hidden biases. These sites have consequently become a popular destination for students and professionals in a wide variety of fields as well as for the public at large.
  • Project Implicit’s sites have received substantial media attention, with dozens of stories in newspapers (e.g., New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), magazines (e.g., Newsweek, Time, Psychology Today), television (e.g., Dateline NBC, Discovery Channel, CNN) and radio (both public and commercial, in the United States and overseas).

Findings observed in seven years of operation of the Project Implicit web site

  • Implicit biases are pervasive. They appear as statistically "large" effects that are often shown by majorities of samples of Americans. Over 80% of web respondents show implicit negativity toward the elderly compared to the young; 75-80% of self-identified Whites and Asians show an implicit preference for racial White relative to Black.
  • People are often unaware of their implicit biases. Ordinary people, including the researchers who direct this project, are found to harbor negative associations in relation to various social groups (i.e., implicit biases) even while honestly (the researchers believe) reporting that they regard themselves as lacking these biases.
  • Implicit biases predict behavior. From simple acts of friendliness and inclusion to more consequential acts such as the evaluation of work quality, those who are higher in implicit bias have been shown to display greater discrimination. The published scientific evidence is rapidly accumulating. Over 200 published scientific investigations have made use of one or another version of the IAT.
  • People differ in levels of implicit bias. Implicit biases vary from person to person - for example as a function of the person’s group memberships, the dominance of a person’s membership group in society, consciously held attitudes, and the level of bias existing in the immediate environment. This last observation makes clear that implicit attitudes are modified by experience.