What is it about?
Many researchers say that the IAT measures "attitudes people are unable or unwilling to report". This explanation assumes that IAT scores either represent "unconscious attitudes" or attitudes that are at odds with social desirability concerns, such that people would not report them even if they could. We have shown in many other studies that this presentation is inaccurate. Instead, we repeatedly find that the IAT measures spontaneous reactions towards concrete people that we may or may not always notice (e.g., Hahn, Judd, Hirsh, & Blair, 2014). In the current paper we want to show that even if one does not care about accuracy, perpetuating the "unable or unwilling" explanation is bad because it can thwart the way to designing effective interventions aimed at acknowledgement of bias. Specifically, if you believe that (1) implicit evaluations (such as IAT scores) measure "unconscious attitudes", then the only way to foster a discussion about these biases would be to tell people about them, because you assume they cannot observe them themselves, since they are "unconscious". If you believe that (2) people wouldn't admit to their biases, you have to tell them that you will know those biases in the future to force them to admit to them, since this will then encourage them to be more "honest". Our conceptualization of implicit bias offers different and more effective interventions methods. Specifically, if you follow our conceptualizations you have to simply confront someone with concrete stimuli of people from different races and ask them whether they feel a bias. Because we have found repeatedly that IAT scores measure just that: A spontaneous affective reaction. If we're correct, then a discussion on implicit bias demands (3) that people start paying attention to their spontaneous affective reactions. Across 6 studies we show on a variety of different outcome measures that only our method reliably works. People (1) don't like to be told that they are biased by psychological tests. Similarly, (2) telling people that you will know about their biases usually leaves them unimpressed. However, (3) having people observe their own reactions to different people works. Our participants who did that consistently reported realizing that they harbor unwated biases. Hence, inaccurate presentations of implicit bias as representing "unconscious attitudes", or attitudes people are "unwilling to report" isn't just scientifically wrong. It also prevents headway in applied work on automatic biases.
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Why is it important?
Scientific accuracy matters not just for scientists. As an applied researcher who wants to work with "implicit bias", you need to be specific and accurate about what "implicit bias" is, otherwise you will design ineffective interventions and give people inaccurate ideas about what to do about it. We try to demonstrate this with the present work.
Perspectives
I have often heard from other researchers working with "implicit bias" that they continue to call implicit biases "unconscious attitudes" despite of work questioning this presentation. When asked why a scientist would stick to presentation that isn't entirely correct, the answer often is that "the concept of unconscious bias is so easy to understand for lay people". That bothered me. I understand the desire to make things simple for non-scientists who want to use our work (and I can admittedly learn a lot here). However, perpetuating inaccurate information just because it is easy to understand is fundamentally flawed because you are in fact preventing people from using your work fruitfully. With the current paper I wanted to show this very point: That misunderstanding what the IAT measures will lead you to design less effective interventions. There is currently a lot of talk about making implicit bias testing widely accessible, about talking more openly about it. We don't know if that will in fact improve interracial relations, it may not. But we cannot start openly discussing and evaluating whether acknowledgement of bias is a good thing if we disseminate inaccurate ideas of what implicit bias even is, and design ineffective interventions aimed at acknowledgement of bias as a result. Hence, I hope this paper will convince a few more people to stop talking about "unconscious attitudes" who previously thought this presentation was just "easy to understand".
Dr. Adam Hahn
Universitat zu Koln
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Facing one’s implicit biases: From awareness to acknowledgment., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, October 2018, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000155.
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