A very cool website about subconscious stereotyping

This was marked as a “Cool Site” by the Special Library Associations e-mail newsletter. And it is just that. You can do demo tests related to this research being done by Harvard.

Project Implicit

The tests measure response time when sorting words into good and bad and sorting images and words related to some other variable. I was really surprised to find out that I slightly to moderately preferred that which was most similar to me on every test I took. I was even more surprised when I slightly preferred non-Arabic names to Arabic names because my very own last name was one of the examples of an Arabic name that was used. The tests don’t say much about what one really thinks, but just split second subconscious reactions. I found the political one rather amusing. On that, I learned that I like Nixon slightly more than George W. Bush. Poor Nixon, I barely know anything about the guy and I apparently dislike him quote a bit.

The importance of symmetry

In my psych. of HCI seminar, we were talking about the effect of aesthetics on perceived usability. That made me think of an article that appeared in Arts & Letters Daily a while back that discussed studies about attractiveness in human-human interaction. Given that one of the other topics considered in the class is how people tend to treat computers as social agents, I wondered if it might be effective to look at traditional characteristics of human attractiveness for ideas when designing aesthetically interfaces. One of the main characteristics of attractiveness that I remembered from this paper is that of symmetry. When I brought this up as a measurable attribute of human attractiveness, my class found it rather amusing. Anyway, below is the link to the article:

Looks Do Matter

Wilson Quarterly