Implicated

I have a slight preference for President George W. Bush over Presidents Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, and even Lincoln. And I've got the psychographic profile to prove it. That's the verdict from Harvard's Implicit Association Test, which flashes words and presidential photos on a screen in what seemed to me a blatant lift from the assassins' movie in The Parallax View. I haven't taken the tests on race, age and gender yet. The New York Times avers that the implicit associations tests "have been taken more than 2.5 million times, with occasionally surprising results."

Comments

[RS]

I could sense....your sense of denial is overwhelming - like a boy who doesn't want to be like his father.

[JDM]

Maybe I'll take the tests at *tolerance.org*. I wonder if they'll tell me I'm secretly biased...

[Warren]

I have a slight preference for G.W. Bush of Thomas Jefferson?!?!?!?!

I got better results from ZOLTAR

[Bobnormal]

I found out that I have a slight preference to young people who'd of thought...

[Lefty]

All I saw was a smirking chimp.

[Kevin Carson]

Whaddaya mean, "even" Lincoln? He was one of the worst presidents in history.

[Matt W.]

After several minutes of that I could feel both hemispheres of my brain trying to duke it out with one an other. hehe, I think I now have the tool to perform mental brain surgery on myself, if they took the complexity of that even farther you could probably give yourself a spontaneou aneurism.

[Brian]

The race test was featured on King of the Hill a few weeks back...very funny episode.

I'm relieved to learn that I really don't have a preference for white or black people. There's a load off...I was always concerned that I might be subconsciously prejudiced. I wonder if I can get some sort of certificate from Harvard that says "Not a Bigot"?

[Amanda]

I'm indifferent between Thomas Jefferson and Bush Jr
I don't associate science with men rather than women
I prefer the old to young.
I moderately prefer Bush Jr to Nixon.

I think there is something terribly wrong with this test.

(I also wonder if they take into account the bias associated with quickly recognizing a familiar picture)

[Brian E.]

I spent ten minutes of my life, drunk, and was told what I already knew: that I preferred David Letterman to Jay Leno (I clicked on the 'research' icon). Well, duh.

[Ann B.]

I discovered just as I thought, that I hate GWB and FDR equally...no preference.

[Brad S]

Brian - I was wondering if someone was going to mention that most excellent King of the Hill episode on here. If you didn't do it, I was going to.

[cinco de mayo]

leftie calls him a chimp! bhahahahaa! did you write that one?

leftie is just a walking cliche lately

[jim]

It took a Harvard researcher to devise a test to distinguish between words like "good" and "bad", and pictures of two men separated by roughly 200 years. The 10 dumbest people I ever met went to or worked at harvard.

[Joe L.]

Yes, DAMN, that Lincoln! He created a one-party dictatorship and set up the death camps we now... Oh wait he didn't!? Did he? Oh yeah, preserved the Union, freed the slaves, preserved the greatest nation on Earth, thereby ensuring that Fascism and Communism fail in the 20th Century... But other than that, BAD MAN! One more reason to people laugh &/or scratch their heads when they meet "libertaians."

[Madog]

I seem to have a moderate preference for abstaining, a moderate preference for Clinton over Bush, a slight preference for young over old, a slight association of men with science and no preference between white and black.

It's a neat test, if you read about it basicly they time you when you're catagorizing all the stuff, so if you for instance go faster when Clinton and Good are put together than when Clinton and Bad are put together, you like Clinton more than you dislike him 🙂

I'll have to pass this on, great link!

[Kevin Carson]

Joe L:

Lincoln didn't "save" the Union, he refounded it. He replaced the Constitution of 1787, based on the voluntary accession of the states, with one based on conquest.

In addition: he set the first precedents for the extra-constitutional war powers of the presidency; he set precedents as well for suspending the constitution's civil liberty protections in wartime (a very strong incentive for a president to BE in wartime as much as possible *ahem*); as a good mercantilist Whig, he helped lay the foundations for the corporatist system we have today, instead of a free market.

In other words, he replaced the country founded by those hell-raisers at Lexington Green with one based on a neocon/straussian idea of Liberty (which is to say no liberty at all).

And the people who scratch their heads when they hear denunciations of Lincoln are probably the same people who think environmental problems are caused by the free market: products of the dumbed-down government school system. If it's not part of the consensus reality found in an educrat-approved American history text or in Time magazine, it doesn't exist for them.

Take the red pill, man!

[J.W.Boothe]

Lincoln was one of the worst presidents in history . . . some say, after Harrison.

Of course, Harrison was just a jerk, while Lincoln gave us the income tax, suspended Habeas Corpus, pulverized States Rights, all the while never giving a hoot about slavery.

[Lonewacko]

According to the test, I have a slight preference for GWB over FDR, which confirms how I answered their initial quiz.

This left-button/right-button image association test sounds similar to the recent "white racists are morons" press release.

[Homer]

Pigeon-holing dates back to well before the days of Joan of Arc. Now we've electronicized it?? Whoopie-doo!

[Eric D. Dixon]

This seems to be set up so that whichever set of images initially corresponds with "good" words is the set you will end up preferring. By the time the image sets are alternated to the other set of words, my responses were partially instinctual parrotings of the first match-up, so they were partially wrong, and scored lower as a preference in the final analysis. I doubt it says anything about real preference at all.