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0 pointsChris20485y ago0 comments

But what have we been teaching them?

"there is no good evidence that people are unaware of their biases. While people do often express surprise at the score they get on the Implicit Association Test, that often reflects the labels that are used to express the degree of bias rather than the presence of some difference in attitudes toward different groups"

-- https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/ulterior-motives/201...

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shadowgovt5y ago

The IAT is only one measure. https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand...

Chris2048OP5y ago

I mention the IAT specifically b/c it can be used in "teaching people about unconscious bias" as a coercive tool to prove to people that they are racist i.e in the context of OP: "to help people who don't believe they are racists".

I have no problem with teaching accurate information wrt bias; but on the other hand, that metric doesn't impel people to label themselves racist, which seems to be a goal.

alentist5y ago

The IAT is pseudoscience.

The Implicit Association Test at Age 21: No Evidence for Construct Validity [0]

> The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is 21 years old. Greenwald et al. (1998) proposed that the IAT measures individual differences in implicit social cognition. This claim requires evidence of construct validity. I review the evidence and show that there is insufficient evidence for this claim. Most important, I show that few studies were able to test discriminant validity of the IAT as a measure of implicit personality characteristics and that a single-construct model fits multi-method data as well or better than a dual-construct models. Thus, the IAT appears to be a measure of the same personality characteristics that are measured with explicit measures. I also show that the validity of the IAT varies across personality characteristics. It has low validity as a measure of self-esteem, moderate validity as a measure of racial bias, and high validity as a measure of political orientation. The existing evidence also suggests that the IAT measures stable characteristics rather than states and has low predictive validity of single behaviors. Based on these findings, it is important that users of the IAT clearly distinguish between implicit measures and implicit constructs. The IAT is an implicit measure, but there is no evidence that it measures implicit constructs.

The Creators of the Implicit Association Test Should Get Their Story Straight [1]

> The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.

Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job [2]

[0] https://replicationindex.com/2019/02/15/iat21/

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...

[2] https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...

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