There's a racist inside you

Whether you like it or not, the chances are that you are a racist - that's according to a respected online test that could now become part of standard employment training schemes.

The concepts behind Harvard University's implicit associations test, a simple questionnaire invented more than a decade ago and more commonly used by police forces, are now being utilised by US corporations to help tackle inherent workplace racism.

This follows findings in several studies that companies with a greater diversity of workforce will not only enjoy greater social cohesion but improve their financial performance too.

Increasingly, employers in the US are turning to "unconscious bias training" to identify underlying prejudices in their workforce.

Earlier this year Apple committed more than $50-million to future diversity initiatives, and Facebook's company website has made public a section of its internal training scheme in order to raise awareness of the issue.

Facebook has committed itself to removing unconscious prejudices in its workforce.

"We believe understanding and managing unconscious bias can help us build stronger, more diverse and inclusive organisations," the site states.

"Our goal in publishing this portion of our 'managing bias' training is to achieve broader recognition of the hidden biases we all hold, and to highlight ways to counteract bias in the workplace."

Project Implicit's test requires users to match words such as "joy", "awful" and "pleasure" with close-up photographs of either black or white faces.

In one round it is correct for users to pair positive-sounding words with images of black people, while in the next the right answers are swapped.

The idea is to examine how instinctive it is for people to make judgments on the basis of race.

Versions of the test are available to assess attitudes towards gender, age, finance and sexuality, but the results of the race survey have shown that most people are predisposed to favour white, male, heterosexual individuals - even those who are not members of that demographic.

The test is not without its critics, however. Some academics have suggested that it is a more an indicator of familiarity with different races than of bias.

"One can decrease racial bias scores on the test by simply exposing people to pictures of African-Americans enjoying a picnic, butt respondents who take this test are given feedback suggesting that some enduring quality is being assessed [...] this is not how science is done," Hart Blanton, a psychologist at Texas A&M, told the New York Times.