This article by Goldhill sheds light on how standardized psychological tests such as the Impliciat Association Test (IAT) developed by University of Washington professor Tony Greenwald and colleagues Debbie McGhee, and Jordan Schwartz is being used to fight racism. Goldhill describes how unsettling reliance on this test to battle discrimination can be counterproductive.

The IAT, developed in 1998, has gained widespread acceptance in various domains such as universities, corporate spaces and legal systems, as a reliable test to uncover unconscious implicit biases indicative of racist thoughts. The test presents participants with words or faces and they are instructed to press certain keys to identify European-American faces or African-American faces paired with positive or negative words each. By measuring the speed of associations between target groups and positive or negative concepts, the test claims to uncover hidden prejudices. 

Goldhill details recent research questioning the reliability and validity of the IAT. Users often get different scores when they take the test multiple times, sometimes being concluded as having implicit racial biases and sometimes not. Additionally, the implicit biases concluded from these tests don’t often align with the real-life behavior of these participants. So how useful is the test in measuring racism? And should the results of the test even be taken at face value?

The article also describes how using the IAT uncritically can perpetuate existing racial stereotypes instead of dismantling them. The IAT makes users think that racial biases are implicit and therefore out of their control and hence can’t be changed. This would in turn make people feel not responsible for their racist actions. In this way, Goldhill says, the IAT becomes a scapegoat for racism.

Goldhill suggests that instead of relying solely on implicit bias as an indicator of racism, we should recognize its limitations and focus on real-world actions to reduce inequality. She also focuses on acknowledging that people may not only have implicit biases but also explicit racist or sexist beliefs and encouraging them to recognize and take responsibility for their prejudices. In keeping in line with everything we have spoken about in class, this article says that we shouldn’t assume that understanding our unconscious mind will solve discrimination. Instead of “neuralizing” racism, we should embrace a more nuanced approach that acknowledges the complexities of human behavior and action. 

 

References

Article: https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psychological-test-to-fight-racism

Image: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/jaxt/blogposts/piblogpost005.html

IAT: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html