“Blindspot” by psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald is about this wonderful diagnostic test, the IAT.
The IAT reveals, to the interviewers and social psychology researchers, what you really think. Not what you say you think. Not what you think you say you think. And– God forbid– not what you think you think you think. But what you really think. “Ah ha!”, the researchers exclaim. Now I know the truth: you are a racist. Malcolm Gladwell took the test: busted! Or so he admitted to Oprah, while pointing out that his own mother was black.
These researchers– these “social psychologists”– are generous on one level. They believe that people who say they don’t judge people according to their race or age or physical appearance really mean it and think that they really mean it. So when they administer a test that proves that they do judge people according to their race or age or physical appearance, they believe they have uncovered a terrible secret about humanity and you, lucky reader, get to be let in on it.
There are a lot of problems with this bullshit, at many different levels.
- people are often fully aware of the fact that they don’t mean what they say. In fact, I’d say it’s probably safe to say that most people don’t really mean what they say most of the time. Every good novelist and film-maker– and a lot of bad ones– knows this. Every job applicant knows it. Every politician certainly knows it but so do pastors and priests.
- the IAT claims to bypass a persons’ self-censorship and reveal what a person “really” thinks. The trouble is, you have to assume, firstly, that most people don’t know that they think something other than what they claim to think. In other words, the IAT fails to take into account that most people are quite capable of consciously lying to an interviewer or to a form. Why wouldn’t they? The act of answering questions like “black people are more likely to commit crimes” will immediately push the “careful what you say” button, even if the interviewer thinks the subject has every reason to be perfectly honest with them, or with the form and no matter how often they tell the subject that their answers are confidential. You don’t think a subject can imagine dishonesty or a mistake on the part of a social scientist? In fact, you’ve got to be kidding if you think that for even one moment. Gladwell’s claim to be shocked at his own hidden bias must be taken as disingenuous: I don’t believe for a second that it was really a surprise to him. And if he really thinks that the IAT has proven that he has unconscious prejudices, he is even dumber than I thought.
- the IAT seems to me to prove that people have an instinctive preference for young people (shocking!) or for people of the most privileged class (white people, who are objectively richer and more powerful than any other race on earth) or men, who are often bigger, stronger, and faster than women, and who, until now, have generally held more positions of power, wealth, and influence than women. Who do you want to hang out with? The guy most likely to be able to afford to buy you a drink and dinner? Do you think it’s more likely that a poor person would steal than a rich person? Duh. Do you think a black person, or a native, or a Latino, is more likely to be poor? Hello. Is it fun to listen to conversations about medications, adult diapers, friends who have recently died and how the world sucks now that public morality has slid into the cesspool?
- There are other stereo-types: I’ll bet the average subject doesn’t think of the Japanese as drug-abusing burglars. But they probably do think they study hard. The French are disloyal. People with glasses are smart. Tall people like basketball.
The point is that the biggest lies in our society don’t involve facts and data, but how the information is presented: Banaji and Greenwald are shocked, so they say, to discover that many people who say they think they are not racists actually do “unconsciously” hold racist views.
Their “facts” prove it. Their facts, actually, prove that they are pretty clueless about how people actually process their words and actions in relation to their feelings and inclinations. And they are even more clueless than that: they are surprised that people don’t announce their racist, ageist, and sexist sentiments. They are surprised that no bigot thinks he is a bigot while knowingly holding bigoted views.
As it turns out, someone else’s research seems to show that the results from the IAT are unreliable.
We live in a culture in which people not only hide their unsavory feelings about others– we positively embrace hypocrisy on a monumental scale.
Unconvinced? Banaji and Greenwald note that we often answer “how are you?” with “fine” even if we’re not. They’re on to you!
Afterthought
I am happy to learn I am not alone in my skepticism.
Added 2014-10-04: A NyTimes article questioning the reliability of some “research”.