“What? Me? Racist? More than 2 million people have tested their racial prejudice using an online version of the Implicit Association Test. Most groups’ average scores fall between ‘slight’ and ‘moderate bias, but the differences among groups by age and political identification, are intriguing,” the problem states.” - From image of banned textbook, in Banned, ‘problematic’ Florida math textbooks include racial-bias graph. By Mark Lungariello/New York Post April 22, 2022

“Many subjects chose to stick a hand into a bowl of writhing, wriggling beetle larvae to prevent the larger university community from learning that they had received a (doctored) high ‘racism’ score on an implicit association test (IAT).” - Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, p. 26 (Oxford University Press).

“Two decades ago, the introduction of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) sparked enthusiastic reactions. With implicit measures like the IAT, researchers hoped to finally be able to bridge the gap between self-reported attitudes on one hand and behavior on the other. Twenty years of research and several meta-analyses later, however, we have to conclude that neither the IAT nor its derivatives have fulfilled these expectations. Their predictive value for behavioral criteria is weak and their incremental validity over and above self-report measures is negligible.” - Meissner, F., L. A. Grigutsch, et al. (2019). "Predicting Behavior With Implicit Measures: Disillusioning Findings, Reasonable Explanations, and Sophisticated Solutions." Frontiers in Psychology 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02483

In other words, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) does a poor job of predicting behavior and is no better at predicting behavior than self-report measures. Nor does the IAT appear to provide a window to unconscious bias, given that research participants have been highly accurate in predicting their own IAT scores (Hahn et al, 2014). Nor does the IAT capture stable, context-free racial attitudes that are resistant to change (James, 2018; Gawronski & Hahn, 2019). Rather, implicit bias is less (not more) stable over time than self-reported bias (Gawronski, 2019). Isn’t it time to retire this useless measure?

Unfortunately, despite the false assumptions and lack of explanatory power, the IAT is still being sold as a measure that reveals the inner racist in most of us. But it doesn’t. And that’s just one reason why IAT shouldn’t be presented in textbooks as if it were based on established science.

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References:

Corneille O, Hütter M. Implicit? What Do You Mean? A Comprehensive Review of the Delusive Implicitness Construct in Attitude Research. Personality and Social Psychology Review. 2020;24(3):212-232. doi:10.1177/1088868320911325

Hahn, A., Judd, C. M., Hirsh, H. K., & Blair, I. V. (2014). Awareness of implicit attitudes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1369–1392. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035028

James, L. The Stability of Implicit Racial Bias in Police Officers. Police Quarterly. 2018;21(1):30-52. doi:10.1177/1098611117732974

Gawronski B. Six Lessons for a Cogent Science of Implicit Bias and Its Criticism. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 2019;14(4):574-595. doi:10.1177/1745691619826015

Gawronski, B., and Hahn, A. (2019). “Implicit measures: procedures, use, and interpretation” in Measurement in social psychology. eds. H. Blanton, J. M. LaCroix, and G. D. Webster (New York: Taylor & Francis), 29–55.

Meissner, F., L. A. Grigutsch, et al. (2019). "Predicting Behavior With Implicit Measures: Disillusioning Findings, Reasonable Explanations, and Sophisticated Solutions." Frontiers in Psychology 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02483

Schimmack U. The Implicit Association Test: A Method in Search of a Construct. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 2021;16(2):396-414. doi:10.1177/1745691619863798