It is claimed that implicit association tests, or IATs, reveal unconscious biases against racial and ethnic minorities and other stigmatized groups. The tests are simple and their results appear to be straightforward to interpret: if you are quicker to associate positive words (or other positive stimuli) with the non-stigmatized group (e.g., whites) and quicker to associate negative words with the stigmatized group (e.g., blacks), you have an implicit preference for the former and against the latter. Moreover, it has been shown that IAT scores are (modestly) related to arguably discriminatory behaviors. Given that the IAT scores of most people suggest that they are biased against stigmatized groups, it has been claimed that implicit biases explain discriminatory behaviors in the real world.
Hart Blanton, a long-term critic of various theoretical and methodological absurdities in the IAT paradigm, has written, with some colleagues, a paper challenging a key assumption of the IAT. Re-analyzing several published implicit bias studies, they found that the standard IAT scoring procedure will typically label as implicitly biased people whose observed behavior is neutral and unbiased. IAT researchers assume that individuals who associate positive and negative IAT stimuli with different groups with equal ease are unbiased, but the research by Blanton et al. suggests that such individuals tend to be biased in favor of the stigmatized group. In other words, the zero point of the IAT scale is not associated with behavioral neutrality.
The results of Blanton et al. are pretty straightforward, but not necessarily easy to understand, so I’ll try to clarify them a bit. Continue reading