The document discusses unconsciously motivated behaviors and the results of an Implicit Association Test (IAT) on race. The author acknowledges having a moderate unconscious bias against African Americans, as shown by the IAT, despite believing they did not form biases based on race. They theorize that recently watching a TV show where the criminal was African American may have influenced the test results by unconsciously strengthening an association between African Americans and crime.

1. 3. Do you agree with the argument that we are completely oblivious to our unconsciously motivated
behavior? Is this just a convenient excuse to justify our biases?
I disagree, because we have some notion of when these unconsciously motivated behaviors are at
work. For instance, I often disregard the elders’ comments in computer technology, because I
unconsciously have formed a generalization that the elders are not familiar with the volatile computer
technology and thus disregard their comments. I am somewhat cognizant of this happening, so we
are not completely oblivious to our unconsciously motivated behaviors.
IAT
This is the result from the IAT test I took on race. I have always believed that I do not form bias on a
person with his or her race. However, my results showed me that I have a moderate bias against the
African Americans. According to their standards, this is two markbands away from my expected result.
I think that one external factor that have affected my score is me watching an episode of a TV series,
“Mentalist”, in which the criminal was an African American just before I took this test. A theory that this
experience can be labeled under the “seeing is believing”, because by seeing an African American
person having done a crime, I was made to believe and generalize that all African Americans are bad.