Some of you may know of the Harvard's Implicit Association Test (IAT). Its purpose is to show how we all have implicit biases and if we're not careful these biases show up in our behavior. It turns out the test is useless as there's no real connection between bias and behavior: you can have an implicit racial bias but it does not mean you behave as a racist.
This is a big blow for the SJW crowd. The Harvard IAT has been foundational for telling us how we're all racists and we need cultural sensitivity classes. My own school has their freshmen read books on implicit biases, priming them for SJW bullshit theories.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-...cit/238807
This is a big blow for the SJW crowd. The Harvard IAT has been foundational for telling us how we're all racists and we need cultural sensitivity classes. My own school has their freshmen read books on implicit biases, priming them for SJW bullshit theories.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-...cit/238807
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About 70 percent of people who take the race version of the Implicit Association Test show the same tendency — that is, they prefer faces with typically European-American features over those with African-American features. Since it first went online in 1998, millions have visited Harvard’s Project Implicit website, and the results have been cited in thousands of peer-reviewed papers. No other measure has been as influential in the conversation about unconscious bias.
That influence extends well beyond the academy. The findings come up often in discussions of police shootings of black men, and the concept of implicit bias circulated widely after Hillary Clinton mentioned it during the presidential campaign. The test provides scientific grounding for the idea that unacknowledged prejudice often lurks just below society’s surface. "When we relax our active efforts to be egalitarian, our implicit biases can lead to discriminatory behavior," according to the Project Implicit website, "so it is critical to be mindful of this possibility if we want to avoid prejudice and discrimination."
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Hart Blanton was not stunned. For the last decade, Blanton, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, has been arguing that the Implicit Association Test isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In a 2013 meta-analysis of papers, Blanton and his co-authors declared that, despite its frequent characterization as a window into the unconscious, "the IAT provides little insight into who will discriminate against whom, and provides no more insight than explicit measures of bias." (By "explicit measures" they mean simply asking people if they are biased against a particular group.)
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Banaji, a professor of psychology at Harvard, doesn’t question Blanton’s motives. She does, however, point to the multitude of papers that have made use of the implicit-bias measure, and the relatively few that have questioned its accuracy. In an email, she likened IAT doubters to climate-change deniers. "I’m sure Hart Blanton believes himself to be saving humanity from the dangers of the IAT," she wrote, noting that Blanton has "dedicated so many precious years of his career to improving our work."
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Patrick Forscher, who shares the title of first author of the paper with Calvin Lai, a Harvard postdoc, thinks that there’s been pressure on researchers over the years to make the science of implicit bias sound more definitive and relevant than the evidence justifies. "A lot of people want to know, How do we tackle these disparities?" says Forscher, a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "It makes us feel important to say, Aha, we have these measures that can tell us what the problem is, and, not only that, we can tell them how to fix the problem."
That’s essentially Blanton’s argument as well. Public discussion about implicit bias has been based largely on the results from one particular test, and that test, in his view, has been falsely sold as solid science. "They have engaged the public in a way that has wrapped the feeling of science and weight around a lot of ‘cans’ and ‘maybes,’" Blanton says. "Most of your score on this test is noise, and what signal there is, we don’t know what it is or what it means."
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Forscher hopes the discussion will move beyond the long-running, sometimes caustic back-and-forth over the IAT. He wants to focus on understanding the root causes of discrimination in order to combat its pernicious effects. As part of that mission, he’s for several years helped train police officers in Madison about bias. He intends to continue that work while also trying to figure out how best to go about it.
"I see implicit bias as a potential means to an end, something that tells us what to do and some possible remedies for what we see in the world," Forscher says. "So if there’s little evidence to show that changing implicit bias is a useful way of changing those behaviors, my next question is ‘What should we do?’"