article_snippet: Workers at the U.S. government's Forest Service have been asked to use online tests to check whether Workers at the U.S. government's Forest Service are secretly racist, or harboring other biases.
article_snippet: The federal employees were asked to use work time to take tests, lasting some 15 minutes each, to see whether The federal employees have unconscious biases based on sexuality, nationalist, race and whether somebody is disabled.
article_snippet: Employees were asked to take assessments such as the above on race, where users alternate between sorting black and white people, then good and bad qualities.
article_snippet: The speed with which Employees do it determined underlying bias, according to the study .
article_snippet: the Harvard tests are a kind of word association game, which flashes up emotions or qualities such as 'happy', 'agony' and 'laughter', which users must sort into 'good' and 'bad' categories.
article_snippet: These are then mixed with elements of the category being tested - for example the race test flashes up pictures of black and white faces.
article_snippet: Participants complete several rounds of testing, first being instructed to associate all the 'good' words with one race, then the other.
article_snippet: The more quickly and accurately Participants make each association - good or bad - The stronger Participants underlying bias is said to be.
highlights_snippet: Word association exercise judges what people's biases could be .
  