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For our Week Eight Forum, please do the following:
Step 1. Read the Week Eight Lesson and (under the Lessons tab) and
Step 2. Engage in the interactive activity given in the Week Eight Lesson. The interactive activity is also presented here:
Interactive element
Harvard Implicit Experiment – Interactive Research Project
As we go forth from this class, you may wish to think about how your own beliefs, perceptions, and possibly even biases may come into play in your definitions of deviant, normal, right, and wrong.
To explore your own perceptions about people, try Project implicit at Harvard University. It is part education, part research experiment. You can be part of the research project! Please go to this link to read all about it.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html
Then, navigate here:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
and choose a test to take.
The Implicit Association Test measures the attitudes and beliefs that you may have which are subconscious or simply not thought about on a regular basis. We may hold many beliefs or simply preferences that come from our cultural influences, upbringing, biases, and elsewhere and we may simply not be aware of them. This test aims to get at those underlying beliefs and preferences.
After taking the test, think about the following:
Were you surprised at the results?
How accurate do you feel they are?
How does this type of research reveal why the study of deviance is important?
Step 3. In our Week Eight Forum, please post your answer to the following questions:
Describe in detail your experience with this activity. What steps did you take, what were your feelings and thoughts during the activity, and what were the results you received? Do you agree or disagree with the results and the method used? And, how might you apply this activity to your own understanding of deviance as you look back over what you have learned in this course? How might the activity be of use to you in other areas of your life, for example professionally, personally, socially, culturally?
