Implicit Bias Test

I thoroughly enjoyed this Jesse Singal interview on Rationally Speaking on the problems with  the "implicit association test" for diagnosing implicit bias.

The following Dateline video shows how the test was sold to the public as scientifically robust.

For fun, you can take the test yourself.

For the problems with the test, check out Jesse Singal's piece from earlier this year, "Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job". It is a thoughtful essay, that should be read in its entirety.

A pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments. The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such. The history of the test suggests it was released to the public and excitedly publicized long before it had been fully validated in the rigorous, careful way normally demanded by the field of psychology.

Singal is careful to point out that just because IAT is flawed it doesn't imply that implicit bias doesn't exist. I liked an analogy he used in the podcast. If a thermometer is flawed, you can't use it to determine if a person has a fever. The person may or may not have a fever, but the thermometer should probably be tossed away.