From the sidebar of a WSJ article on pollsters trying to uncover the truth when voters lie:

The findings from Project Implicit’s six million participants over a decade of testing reveal lingering suspicion of minority groups: Some 75% of whites, Hispanics and Asians show a bias for whites over African-Americans. Two-thirds of all respondents feel better toward heterosexuals than gays, Jews than Muslims and thin people over the obese. Minorities appear to carry some of the same biases. As many African-Americans show a preference for whites as for blacks. A third of Arab Muslims show a bias in favor of non-Muslims, and more than a third of gays prefer straight people. The strongest biases are against the elderly. More than 80% of test-takers showed a bias for the young, and that included respondents older than 60.

Project Implicit — which is funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation — studies how people associate a group of people, shown in photographs, with either positive or negative words. (Demonstrations and registration for the full tests are available online at implicit.harvard.edu.) […]

Bias against African-Americans and the elderly will likely play a role in November’s presidential election. Presumed Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama’s father was black, and presumed Republican Party nominee John McCain is about to turn 72 years old. But researchers say they do not know to what degree bias will play out among voters. “We are not slaves to our associations,” says University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek, one of Project Implicit’s founders and principal researchers. A focus on Sen. Obama’s promise of change, for example, could lead voters to forget his race; Sen. McCain’s war record could let voters forget his age. Overriding bias requires a concerted effort, Mr. Nosek says. Most people don’t see their own implicit bias, which can appear spontaneously as intuition, a gut feeling or a vague doubt about a candidate.

Via Digby, “As the understanding of this phenomenon becomes more and more sophisticated, we can expect its application in politics (and business) to become equally sophisticated — by creating backlash in unusual ways and playing to people’s resentments about being called on their resentments.”