Posted 10:18 AM by steve

Being stuck at home due to a few snowflakes in the air (it's not so much that I'm stuck, owning a big SUV, it's just that everything seems to have shut down in anticipation of the snow), I took a few of the tests that Kevin pointed out....

It seems that I have a 'moderate automatic preference for Kerry relative to Bush', which has gotten me all depressed thinking that I voted for the wrong guy, that I should have been out protesting last week, that I should be writing about missing votes in Ohio and all the other things that Kerry supporters are supposed to be doing.

Or maybe, for all of their book smarts, the designers of the test have totally botched things up?

The way they've designed the do-it-at-home tests, you hit one button in response to one set of stimuli, another button in response to the opposite set of stimuli. According to the test, how fast you respond to each set determines your preferences. If you like Bush, you're likely to respond faster to 'Bush' stimuli than 'Kerry' stimuli. Now, my non-Phd mind tells me that in a game of either-or, you focus on looking for one set of stimuli and when you see that set, you're faster to respond than if you are presented with the opposite, the 'or' set of stimuli. For example, if I am focusing on Bush, then I will be faster to respond to 'Bush' stimuli than 'Kerry' stimuli. And the reverse holds true.

The validity of the designer's hyphothesis thus depends on whether a person who prefers Bush will select Bush as their 'either' and Kerry as their 'or'. In my case, I mixed it up a bit. Sometimes I focused on Bush, sometimes I focused on Kerry. Probably enough so to throw off the results. Which could also explain why I have little or no automatic preference for Bush compared to other recent Presidents, why I have a moderate preference for young opposed to old and why some of the other people taking the tests (see Wizbang's comments) also have results that strike them as being, shall I say, off?

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