What is bias? What is racism? What is bigotry? No matter who they are or what their background, most people have a general idea what these things are, and they don't want to be accused of them. I can't speak for everyone, but whether or not I am being fair to a person involves whether I would allow his skin color or ethnicity to affect my evaluation of him as a human being. How I react to words on paper or words floating on a screen has very little to do with how I might feel about human beings, and I suspect other people are the same.

As a matter of fact, words make me immediately suspicious, because they are so often used to manipulate. I get my guard up at anything -- whether words or images -- which seem contrived or calculated to direct my thinking. While not everyone would share my almost paranoid suspicion about words, I think most people like to think of themselves as fair minded, they get their guard up at anything which might make them look otherwise.

Something like this, perhaps?

That's how the "IMPLICIT ASSUMPTIONS TEST" (IAT) looks. (There are more screenshots below.) The idea is to choose as rapidly as you can by associating the bottom word with either the left side (by clicking "e") or the right side (by clicking "i"). After getting through the test by labeling the words at the bottom as "good" or "bad," the pattern reverses itself, with "good" and "bad" positions reversing from right to left. How biased you are depends on how fast you have to think about it.

Huh?

What if you're trying to show that you're not biased? Remember, this is a test, and you are told to move through it rapidly. That's easier said than done, because it's testing not reality, but appearances. (In this case, the appearance of how we react to words.)

Anyone who has ever tried not to think about elephants will understand the mechanics behind what I think amounts to a cheap parlor trick.

But the test, it is claimed, shows that Republicans are bigots:

For their study, Nosek, Banaji and social psychologist Erik Thompson culled self-acknowledged views about blacks from nearly 130,000 whites, who volunteered online to participate in a widely used test of racial bias that measures the speed of people's associations between black or white faces and positive or negative words. The researchers examined correlations between explicit and implicit attitudes and voting behavior in all 435 congressional districts.

The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.

"Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the prejudice level of the president," said Banaji, "but it does show that George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice."

Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said the results matched his own findings in a study he conducted ahead of the 2000 presidential election: Volunteers shown visual images of blacks in contexts that implied they were getting welfare benefits were far more receptive to Republican political ads decrying government waste than volunteers shown ads with the same message but without images of black people.

Anyone can take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) here. According to the authors at the web site, the test

Race ('Black - White' IAT). This IAT requires the ability to distinguish faces of European and African origin. It indicates that most Americans have an automatic preference for white over black.

Mick Wright has some questions:

Why, for instance, does it focus only on whites, or only on racial attitudes? Why isn’t the study interested in the racial attitude of black partisans, and why doesn’t the study look at the way religious biases affect political decisions?

When you realize that the study is biased, and the researchers are biased, it’s a little easier to imagine that perhaps the study’s results aren’t 100% certain.

Psychologist Dr. Helen Smith expresses skepticism in a very thoughtful post:

The test takes a bit of time--try it for yourself. But I remain a skeptic of this silly biased test--especially since the researchers are giving money to the Democratic Party--including Howard Dean. Doesn't that fact tell you all you need to know about the reliability and validity of their "unbiased" research? And where is any research done by conservative psychologists about liberals? Or is conservative and psychologist an oxymoron?

Back to the WaPo:

For their study, Nosek, Banaji and social psychologist Erik Thompson culled self-acknowledged views about blacks from nearly 130,000 whites, who volunteered online to participate in a widely used test of racial bias that measures the speed of people's associations between black or white faces and positive or negative words.

If we put aside the argument of whether the test is of any value, its stated purpose is to determine what is unconsicious, and by definition not acknowledged. From the web site:

The IAT was originally developed as a device for exploring the unconscious roots of thinking and feeling. This web site has been constructed for a different purpose -- to offer the IAT to interested individuals as a tool to gain greater awareness about their own unconscious preferences and beliefs.

Many years ago, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote: "Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind."

Not all scientists are convinced, however.

The problem lies with the IAT lies in how it measures and draws inferences based on the information that it collects, Blanton says. The "metrics" of the test are not tied to real-world events, which could make them less subjective, he points out. The term "metric" refers to the numbers that the observed measures take on when describing individuals' ratings on the topic of interest, he explains. For instance on a scale measuring a person's attractiveness, a metric might range from the lowest possible rating of 1 to the highest possible rating of 10.

"Matters of metric arbitrariness are of minor consequence for theory testing and theory development, but they can be important for applied work when one is trying to diagnose an individual's absolute standing on a dimension or when one wishes to gain a sense of the magnitude and importance of change," Blanton says.

Which is why I compare it to trying not to think about elephants.

Sigh.

Go ahead. Take the test. Maybe if you see it as simple entertainment you'll improve your score.

And of course, if you don't like the test, we'll know why. . .