Hate is a strong word though, on the pretty vague scale given to me (screen grab shown on the right) to show what my implicit bias is for or against four of the big religions, the Abrahamic religions are clustered around the “I could fucking care less” midpoint. Buddhism, though, seems to be a good deal down there.

This is part of Harvard’s Project Implicit, a test that’s supposed to show actual biases for thinks like race, religion, etc. I took the race test a while back and it showed that I had a slight preference for Jews over other races. This religion bias test put Judaism a little below Christianity and Islam, but they’re clustered pretty close to the middle.

If Harvard only got on the ball and make these all Web 2.0 with Facebook links, they could probably gather 100 fold the number of online test takers. Though, this is supposed to be just a demo, soo…

Thank you for your participation. Your implicit association results, appearing to the right, are for entertainment and educational purposes only.

Religions closer to the top of the figure were more strongly associated with good than religions closer to the bottom of the figure. The ratings are relative, meaning that the good and bad religion ratings are in comparison to the other religions. In this display, the ones that are most positive (least negative) would appear toward the top and the ones that are most negative (least positive) would appear toward the bottom.

…snip…

One topic of particular interest is whether self-reported attitudes towards religions agree or disagree with implicit associations. Were yours consistent? If not, why might that be, and what consequence does it have? These are some of the questions we are addressing with on-going research.