The Washington Post Magazine published a lengthy but provocative piece by Shankar Vedantam regarding a technique which tests for racial bias. The test, known as the Implicit Association Test, was developed by three researchers including Harvard’s Mahzarin Banaji:
AT 4 O’CLOCK ON A RECENT WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, a 34-year-old white woman sat down in her Washington office to take a psychological test. Her office decor attested to her passion for civil rights — as a senior activist at a national gay rights organization, and as a lesbian herself, fighting bias and discrimination is what gets her out of bed every morning. A rainbow flag rested in a mug on her desk.
The woman brought up a test on her computer from a Harvard University Web site. It was really very simple: All it asked her to do was distinguish between a series of black and white faces. When she saw a black face she was to hit a key on the left, when she saw a white face she was to hit a key on the right. Next, she was asked to distinguish between a series of positive and negative words. Words such as “glorious” and “wonderful” required a left key, words such as “nasty” and “awful” required a right key. The test remained simple when two categories were combined: The activist hit the left key if she saw either a white face or a positive word, and hit the right key if she saw either a black face or a negative word.
Then the groupings were reversed. The woman’s index fingers hovered over her keyboard. The test now required her to group black faces with positive words, and white faces with negative words. She leaned forward intently. She made no mistakes, but it took her longer to correctly sort the words and images.
Her result appeared on the screen, and the activist became very silent. The test found she had a bias for whites over blacks.
That must suck. I think most of us are pretty sure that we aren’t racists or bigots, but its an eye-opener to see how the biases of society seep into our subconscious.
“I’m surprised,” the woman said. She bit her lip. “And disappointed.”
MAHZARIN BANAJI WILL NEVER FORGET HER OWN RESULTS THE FIRST TIME SHE TOOK A BIAS TEST, now widely known as the Implicit Association Test. But whom could she blame? After all, she’d finally found what she was looking for.
Growing up in India, Banaji had studied psychophysics, the psychological representation of physical objects: A 20-watt bulb may be twice as bright as a 10-watt bulb, for example, but if the two bulbs are next to each another, a person may guess the difference is only 5 watts. Banaji enjoyed the precision of the field, but she realized that she found people and their behavior toward one another much more interesting. The problem was that there was no accurate way to gauge people’s attitudes. You had to trust what they told you, and when it came to things such as prejudice — say, against blacks or poor people — people usually gave politically correct answers. It wasn’t just that people lied to psychologists — when it came to certain sensitive topics, they often lied to themselves. Banaji began to wonder: Was it possible to create something that could divine what people really felt — even if they weren’t aware of it themselves?
Being a student of evolution in graduate school, I myself have begun to learn that a great many societal behaviors are rooted in biology and evolution. This behavior is apparently no different
There is likely a biological reason people so quickly make assumptions — good or bad — about others, Banaji says. The implicit system is likely a part of the “primitive” brain, designed to be reactive rather than reasoned. It specializes in quick generalizations, not subtle distinctions. Such mental shortcuts probably helped our ancestors survive. It was more important when they encountered a snake in the jungle to leap back swiftly than to deduce whether the snake belonged to a poisonous species. The same mental shortcuts in the urban jungles of the 21st century are what cause people to form unwelcome stereotypes about other people, Banaji says. People revert to the shortcuts simply because they require less effort.
The article although quite long is an interesting read. I think I am going to take the test for myself now.
The Results-
In the interest of honesty I am publishing my results. They are as follows:
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for White American relative to African American
Wow. I too am embarrassed. I don’t know if I believe the results but I don’t know enough about the method to dismiss it offhand. BUT…I should point out that:
the critics persist. Philip Tetlock, a professor of organizational behavior in the business school at the University of California at Berkeley, and Ohio State University psychology professor Hal Arkes argue that Jesse Jackson might score poorly on the test. They cite the civil rights leader’s statement a decade ago that there was nothing more painful at that stage of his life “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
If a prominent black civil rights leader could hold such a bias, Tetlock and Arkes ask, what do bias scores really mean? Whatever the IAT is measuring, Tetlock and Arkes argue, it is not what people would call discrimination — no one would dream of accusing Jesse Jackson of harboring feelings of hostility toward African Americans.
