I took the same IAT test that Stephanie and Joey took in class and was highly amused; my results showed all four religions (one was Hinduism rather than Buddhism) more or less in the middle of the chart, but Christianity was in the highest place and Buddhism/Islam tied for the lowest. This annoyed me immensely because I am consciously very critical of Christianity and would have said that of the four it is the religion I like least!

I’m not sure what to make of this result. Do I simply disagree with the test and argue that it demonstrated nothing of any relevance about me? Do I agree that the result is meaningful, and therefore question what I consciously think about Christianity? Or does the test mean nothing more than this (and this was a point Stephanie brought up): because I was raised a Christian, the vocabulary of Christianity is familiar to me, even if I disagree with it. Was the test really only revealing the fact that Christian words are slightly more familiar to me than Islamic, Jewish and Hindu terms?

I tend to think that the answer to that last question is yes. Therefore the IAT on religions isn’t actually testing for prejudice or bias against one or another religion, but for familiarity — I’m not anti-Hindu, just less familiar with Hinduism and the terms associated with it. This  justifies the test that was given in the article by Ogunnaike et al.: that test was measuring the ways in which the language one uses affects one’s  perceptions, and in that context,  the degree of familiarity one feels, the degree of community bond, is highly relevant.