Went down to the Science Gallery in Trinity College on Friday night to take part in their 'PAY ATTENTION' event. The Gallery is one of my favourite new places to go at the moment. They had a brilliant Robots exhibition a few weeks ago and now they're running a series of events where members of the public call in and take part in Brain research.. There's a series of tests to determine why we think the way we do, why we forget things as soon as we've been told them, whether we're morning or evening people and lots of other stuff..
Anyway, I took a test to determine my attitudes towards old people and it turns out that I have a strong bias against them! The tests involved placing words into various categories. So I started out with words like mature & teen and categories like 'old' & 'young'. Easy enough, right? Then it got a bit more complicated as words like ugly, peace, love and anger were introduced and needed to be categorised as well. It's all fairly rapid so you don't really have time to think about what you're doing. I guess that's how they tap into our subconscious. I'm not sure it wasn't entrapment!
At the end they added up my results and told me that I have a strong bias towards old people. The chap doing the tests reminded me that I'm not a bad person (thanks!) but I've been conditioned to think that old is worse than young. He said that it's not necessarily my fault (tv, advertisers etc etc) and there's nothing I could do about it. But then he told me that in future I should bear it in mind. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to do that.. Saying that, given that I recently moved into the 35-54 category whenever I'm ticking my age in application forms, it's probably likely that my bias against old people will correct itself naturally!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment