Are most whites and Asians really unconsciously biased against blacks, as indicated by their scores on the computerized Implicit Association Test (IAT)? My Findings column discusses some criticism of the test, and this week on the blog I’ll be quoting more participants in the debate over what the test reveals. You can check out some of their published arguments in the previous post.

It’s something of a custom, when discussing the IAT, to disclose your own score on the test along with your unease. “The result always leaves me feeling a bit creepy,” Malcolm Gladwell writes in “Blink,” explaining that he took the test many times and was told he had “a moderate automatic preference for whites.” Two of the pioneering IAT researchers, Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington (who invented the test) and Mahazarin Banaji of Harvard, have both spoken of the their dismay at discovering their own pro-white scores on the test.

“”I was deeply embarrassed,” Dr. Banaji told the Washington Post. “I was humbled in a way that few experiences in my life have humbled me.”

So I was expecting the worst when I took the test last week. I wanted to do well, just as everyone does, but I didn’t try any devious strategies, which I’d heard were futile anyway. After I spent a few minutes trying to associate positive and negative words with either blacks or whites, the computer analyzed my reaction times and rendered the verdict: “Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between European American and African American.”

Well, this was a different kind of shock. Among test-takers of all races, 70 percent show a preference for whites, and only 17 percent fall into my neutral category. My first impulse was to feel the opposite of embarrassed — should I be proudly giving lessons in conquering bias to Mr. Gladwell and the IAT pioneers? — but on reflection I ended up feeling a bit like Mr. Gladwell: creepy. The whole notion of being judged this way seemed weird. Why should you feel either embarrassed or proud when you’re not sure what produced your score, how you could improve it or how it affects your behavior?

Did I score better than Mr. Gladwell and the IAT researchers because I had less bias, or because I spent less time than they did worrying about racial discrimination? Some critics of the IAT have suggested that focusing on helping African-Americans could cause you to develop negative associations with blacks simply because you’re exposed so often to the problems they face. But that’s just one of countless explanations that could be offered for the differences in our scores — and this multiplicity of unknown factors makes me leery of the test.

You can take the test yourself at the web site of Project Implicit, a collaborative effort of researchers at Harvard, the University of Washington and the University of Virginia. So far it’s been taken more than 8 million times. The researchers explain on the site having an unconscious bias is not the same as being consciously prejudiced or endorsing discrimination, but I’m not sure how reassuring the explanation is:

People who hold egalitarian conscious attitudes in the face of automatic White preferences may able to function in non-prejudiced fashion partly by making active efforts to prevent their automatic White preference from producing discriminatory behavior. However, when they relax these active efforts, these non-prejudiced people may be likely to show discrimination in thought or behavior.

I’m curious to hear your reports on how you scored on the test and how you felt, as well as your thoughts on what lessons can be learned and how they can — or can’t — be applied.