Growing up I had a wall hanging in my bedroom. It was a rectangle of felt fabric with wood at the top and the bottom and it had a poem printed on it. The poem was called Children Learn What They Live. It was written by Dorothy Law Nolte in the early 1950s. I wonder if this poem is familiar to you.

Essentially, Nolte, a parent educator, family counselor, and author, shows the correlation between what children are exposed to and how they will live in their lives. She presents this correlation:

If children live with criticism,
they learn to condemn.

If children live with hostility,
they learn to fight.

If children live with shame,
they learn to feel guilty.

If children live with acceptance,
they learn to love.

These are just a few examples.

And while I’m not a psychologist, I do find it amazing when we start looking at our own lives and when we start sharing our stories with one another, how much of our own value system and how we see the world is shaped, for better or worse, by the things we were exposed to as children.

Some years ago I took a test on implicit bias for the first time. Have you heard the term? This term is used to describe the attitudes we have toward people or the stereotypes we have without our conscious knowledge – without recognizing that we have them. Most implicit bias tests are used to help us understand our own implicit biases and then, perhaps, begin to examine the ways that those implicit biases affect our interactions with people in the world.

You can find lots of implicit bias tests on the internet, and they’re of varying degrees of complexity and length, but the ones I’ve spent the most time with are from Project Implicit at Harvard University. You can find the Project Implicit tests here. 

Harvard has more than a dozen tests that analyze implicit bias on a number of topics, from religion to race to physical appearance and age and gender. Like the Children Learn What They Live characteristics described by Dr. Nolte in her poem, these implicit bias tests are meant to help us understand how we’re shaped to see the world – and then how we live in the world – and how we interact with others. 

For me, that first time I took an implicit bias test, I was really upset and I was defensive after reviewing the results. I felt that the summary didn’t really describe me and I tried to explain away the results – as though I was a lawyer defending against the evidence.

For what, though? To what end? The value of this test, for me, was actually in learning more about myself – about what makes me do the things I do and what affects how I treat other people. That’s really what these tests are all about – how we treat other people – whether we know it or not.

Whether we’re aware of it or not.

This past Sunday, I asked us to each consider the people we might not see in the world. Who are the messengers, like Rhoda, whom we ignore because of their status in life or some other characteristics? I shared that I had to ask myself these same questions. Who do I not see? Who do I ignore who might be carrying the truth? I found it difficult, precisely because if I don’t see someone, how am I able to acknowledge that I don’t see them. I spent a bit of time thinking through this, and then, among other things, I sat down and took a few of the implicit bias tests and opened my eyes a little bit more.

While I acknowledge that these tests are not perfect and are subject to criticism, for my individual purposes I have found that the shift in perspective is helpful for me as I seek to do the difficult work of examining how I see the world and how God calls me to improve myself and love God’s world a little bit more. Give it a try!