Try not to think of our feature as a bug . . .

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?

ArabGood.JPG

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.
No, I don't think it does. I think it indicates how well they respond under this "try not to think about elephants" principle applied under the pressure of a test setting.

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.

I'd go so far as to say the silly thing is about as scientific as a Ouija Board, although I do grant that the principle could be used as a way of influencing consumers to buy products. In fact, it is used in marketing, and I'm wondering... might that be where these Harvard professors got the idea? Implicit assumptions are of great value in marketing, and in advertising they are constantly exploited. But I don't see how such trickery can ever determine what's in a person's heart.

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?
Or how about "conservative journalists"?

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.
"Self acknowledged?"

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."

No doubt that is true, and no doubt there are many Americans who hide things in the inner recesses of their mind. That's the stuff that these psychologists designed the test to find. If you're trying to prove you're not a bigot in a test designed to show you are and the elephant principle gets in your way, at what point does "self acknowledgment" enter the picture? Once the test defeats you? So why does the Washington Post call it "self acknowledged"? (The WaPo has more on the test here, and I don't think they're looking at it as critically as they should. Instead, they defer to the findings of "science"!)

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.

For me, it's as inherently unnatural to see all people as good or all people as bad as it is to see all Muslims as good or all Muslims as bad. Yet this test forces the taker to engage in sweeping generalizations all the while under constant threat of being labeled bigoted. Again, it's the elephant principle, magnified tenfold, almost malevolently so. I think this test's primary "flaw" (I'm not convinced it isn't built in) is to set up people to be haunted by a negative mirror image of themselves as racist, and the harder they try to correct it, the more they stumble and the worse they appear.

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. . .

ArabGood.JPG

ArabBad.JPG

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ArabEvil.JPG

posted by Eric on 02.03.06 at 07:12 AM





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Comments

I couldn't take the test because the first question didn't have an answer I could agree with. I don't prefer white to blacks, blacks to whites, or like whites and blacks equally. In fact, I don't care. And that's not to say that I don't see race, but that I don't prefer people. I don't even like people. And no matter where I am, I'm as distrustful of strangers no matter what they look like.

Dennis   ·  February 3, 2006 07:50 AM

According to scientific findings, such refusals to take the test are almost always grounded in racism!

Your attitude has been duly noted, comrade.

Eric Scheie   ·  February 3, 2006 08:17 AM

Um...what's wrong with having a preference for people of your own race? Could it possibly be that this is a natural, innate characteristic of a healthy, balanced person? And that in fact there's nothing wrong with it? And further, that trying to act as though you don't have this perfectly normal affinity for people like yourself is actually unhealthy?

I'm a racist and I'm comfortable with that. It doesn't mean I'm going to go out and start burning crosses in yards. I'm also a "familyist" and a "speciesist" and a "nationalist" and an "individualist" - meaning I give preference to my family over those not in my family, to my nation over those not of my nation, to my species over lifeforms not of my species, and so forth. That is perfectly normal and healthy. Fellow members of my race are really my extended family, cousins of mine. People of other races are also very distant cousins. But the degree of distance matters. I give preference to my extended family over members of my race because my extended family are closer relations. I give preference to my race over other races because my race are closer relations. This is all entirely normal and up until about 40 years ago it was just common sense. But now we have to twist ourselves into knots trying to pretend that no, no WE aren't racists! It's nonsense.

MarkJ   ·  February 3, 2006 09:57 AM

I took the one about sexuality just to see what would happen. The test was obviously constructed to try to eliminate the possibility that simple reflexes could affect your score, but I don't think it worked too well. The first go-round had "good and homosexuality" on the left and "bad and heterosexuality" on the right. So, you know, of course, the word "impressive" would flash on-screen, and I'd be like, Favorable...like my boyfriend...MAN-ON-MAN ACTION GOOOOD! and type "E" within a nanosecond. But when they switched them around so it was "good and heterosexuality" and "bad and homosexuality," respectively, despite the practice questions that were clearly designed to clear your head, I kept having to double-check whether I needed to hit the left or right side. It had nothing whatever to do with the content of the choices--I don't think heterosexuality is either good or bad in and of itself. I assume the racism/sexism tests work the same way.

Sean Kinsell   ·  February 4, 2006 02:53 AM

I think the way it plays out, the more careful you are, the more bigoted your score.

Eric Scheie   ·  February 4, 2006 02:10 PM


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