Chasen Whitson - Assignment #2: Hidden Bias

I choose to take the test based on age, for me the introductory questions reminded me of this statement explained briefly in the article. “The very act of taking the tests can force hidden biases into the conscious part of the mind.” Asking the participant how they perceive themselves and if they were aware of any conscious preferences/biases that they might have created a similar situation that psychology calls the framing effect. When a person is presented with a positive or negative situation correlating with differences such as age, they are more likely to take risks when presented with a negative situation than a positive one in which they are more likely to play it safe. I feel that this introduces a new variable in the test that may have been overlooked. Reversing the rules and associated positive/negative words with old/young faces during a categorization task of greater difficulty following a relatively simple one lead to myself feeling more confident in my ability to answer quickly rather than answer consistently. And although my results were relatively similar to my answers to the introductory questions; I can also see how this may create hindsight bias for participants following the test.