In this video I discuss the implicit association test (IAT) as well as some of the controversies surrounding interpretations of results and widespread use of the test. Negative attitudes may not always be directly expressed and the implicit association test is meant to be a way of assessing negative attitudes in a way that is difficult to consciously suppress or hide. But while the test may potentially reveal implicit associations, the causes of these associations or their potential impact on actual behavior remains unclear and many claim the test is frequently misused by employers and human resource departments. Lastly I consider an intervention described by Goff, Steele, and Davies for reducing the discomfort of engaging in difficult discussions by focusing on the potential for individual growth and the opportunity for learning from others with different viewpoints.

Project Implicit website: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ Greenwald & Banaji’s book Blindspot: https://amzn.to/2GxW3jv

Roff, Steele, & Davies (2008) The Space Between Us: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~claudes…

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video we looked at group conflict between the Eagles and the Rattlers at Robbers Cave State Park and we saw that the introduction of superordinate goals, where the boys had to cooperate and work together, was able to unite the boys and it was able to reduce negative attitudes, negative evaluations, and discriminatory behavior between the two groups.

But, of course, this is a simplified version of group conflict where it’s fairly easy to measure the negative attitudes and evaluations of these boys at summer camp. And it was also fairly easy to measure how the conflict had been reduced. But in real life negative attitudes are not always so readily expressed. With a few exceptions of fans chanting “Yankees suck”, often negative attitudes and evaluations of particular groups are hard to know about.

One of the reasons for this is that people know that expressing negative attitudes towards certain groups is not socially acceptable. So if you have negative evaluations of a particular racial group, you might try to hide those evaluations. You might try to hide those attitudes from others and this means that it’s difficult to assess whether or not people have negative attitudes about certain groups or how strong those attitudes are. Or whether people have actually gotten better at reducing these negative attitudes, or if people have just got better at hiding them. So can we measure these types of negative evaluations or negative associations in ways that are difficult for people to hide? Ways that are difficult for them to suppress?

This brings us to the Implicit Association Test and this is a controversial topic in psychology for a number of reasons. So we’ll first just look at what the test is and how it works, and then we’ll consider the implications of this research. So the implicit association test, as its name describes, is a test designed to try to measure associations that you might not be consciously aware of; that are implicit. So the way that this is done is by measuring your reaction time to certain types of stimuli and you’re asked to categorize these stimuli or associate them in certain ways. And then your response time in performing these categorizations; your response times are measured for different types of tasks. So the sort of standard version of this is you have a left button and the right button which you press with your left and right hand. And certain associations will be put to the left button.

So for instance you’re going to see a stimulus like a positive word or a white face; if you see either of those things you press the left button. If, however you see a negative word you press the right button or if you see a black face you press the right button. So it’s associating positive words and white faces and negative words and black faces and it’s measuring how quickly you can do this; it’s measuring your response time. And then you do the same task but with reverse pairings; where positive words are paired with black faces or negative words are paired with white faces. And the order that you do these in will be mixed up, which one you do first or which one you do second. You’ll do each of them multiple times to try to reduce the effects of practice on the task.

The idea is that if you associate certain things, like if you associate positive words with white faces, you’ll be a little bit better, you’ll be a little bit faster at that version, that association, rather than if white faces are being paired with negative words. So what most people show is that they tend to be a little bit slower when pairing black faces and positive words and this suggests that people might have an implicit association between black people and negative words and between white people and positive words, and that’s why they’re a little bit faster at those types of pairings and a little bit slower at the opposite pairings.

And if you go to the Project Implicit website you can try this test yourself; you can also try a number of different versions of the test with other types of pairings. So there’s pairings related to age, related to sexual orientation, related to gender, and you can see if you have some implicit associations between certain pairings here. And if you’re interested in learning more about this, as I said, you can go to the project implicit website and you can read the research by Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji. And they also wrote a book about this topic called “Blindspot” which I’ll post a link to in the video description.

But we might ask well, what exactly does this mean? So let’s say that you go to the website, you take this test, maybe you do it for a few different subjects here, they also have some for different political orientations, or maybe you do it for sexual orientation, and let’s say you find that you have some implicit association; some versions of this test that you’re faster or slower at. What does this mean? Well, what we can say is what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that you’re actively prejudiced or that you engage in discrimination because that’s not what’s being measured on this test and it’s important to keep that in mind. It’s not really assessing prejudice or discrimination. What’s being assessed is your response time and so that response time could be influenced by a large number of other factors.

It could be the case that it has something to do with novelty; that there’s certain types of faces that are more familiar or less familiar to you and that influences your reaction time for those types of faces. Or it could be the case that it relates more to how you see yourself as part of an in–group or part of an out–group. And we’ve seen in a previous video that we tend to have an in-group bias We have a preference for our in-group and we don’t have that same type of preference for an out-group. So whether we associate ourselves with a particular group might influence our performance on this test. We might also think about whether this has to do with control over our behavior; our ability to regulate our own behavior and this then might relate to our executive function. And lastly we might consider whether this is just awareness of stereotypes. We might know that there are certain stereotypes that exist in society and that doesn’t necessarily mean that we believe these stereotypes or that we would ever act on them. But perhaps they influence our response time.

And so it’s also important to note that scores on this test don’t predict actual behavior. Even if you score and you show this implicit association, let’s say between black faces and negative words, that doesn’t mean that you would actually ever act on it or that we could predict that you’d act on it. Even people who have very high scores on this IAT, where they show a very strong association, this actually is not very strongly correlated with actual, actual discriminatory behavior.

So this brings us to the misuse of the test, because this test is widely used by employers, it’s used by human resource departments, it’s used in some places for training of police officers. And we might wonder whether or not this is appropriate. Because even the researchers are not entirely clear what exactly this test means, and then even if we were to accept that it truly does represent some sort of negative evaluation of a group, can we overcome it? So if we have some bias that’s unconscious, do we actually have the ability to change that? After all, we’re not even consciously aware of this bias unless this test points it out to us. And so we might wonder about mandatory training programs that have been instituted to try to reduce this unconscious bias in people, and given that we don’t really know what this bias necessarily means it’s hard to say whether we can successfully reduce it.

And we might wonder if this is just a fundamental nature of how our minds process information. We’ve seen in previous videos that our minds rely on our ability to use heuristics, we rely on stereotypes, we have to categorize information, that’s how our minds work. And we might wonder if it’s possible to be truly neutral in all of the associations we form, especially if we’re forming some of these associations unconsciously. Can we really expect that all the associations we’ve formed with our limited information of the world will be fair and balanced associations? And if we don’t act on them, does it matter? If they’re not perfectly fair, should people be punished for unconsciously forming associations that we don’t agree with? So how much should we worry about this implicit association test? And how much should we worry about our own possible unconscious associations?

On the one hand, we might say “well if these don’t predict actual behavior then we needn’t worry about them at all”. But on the other hand we say “well maybe being aware of these could help us to have a greater sense of control over our behavior. We could recognize the possible inclination for these things influencing our attitudes or influencing our evaluations.” Or we might think that we might have some fear related to these unconscious associations. If you take this test and you find out you have some implicit association between certain groups you might become afraid that this is going to leak out somehow. That you might inadvertently say or do something that appears racist, or perhaps appear sexist, or homophobic, or transphobic, or Islamophobic, or ageist, right? Because there are nearly an infinite number of groups that people might be in and there’s a chance that you have some inappropriate type of association for that particular group and it might leak out at an inopportune time. And then you would appear to be opposed to this group in some way. And this might be harmful to you or social standing or harmful in any number of possible ways.

So we might have this fear that our unconscious associations might leak out in some way, and again they’re unconscious, we don’t really think we have full control over them. So maybe this will motivate us to avoid these situations, maybe this motivates us to cling to our own groups and avoid engaging with others. Because when we’re engaged with those others, we might inadvertently do something, we might accidentally let our unconscious bias that we didn’t even know was there leak out. This brings us to a study by Philip Goff, Claude Steele, and Paul Davies in 2008. In this study what the researchers did was they asked participants to prepare for a discussion on racial profiling. So this is potentially a controversial subject. And in the course of getting ready for this discussion, the participants have a chance to see some photos of the other members. So they happen to see some of the paperwork that’s there of who’s supposed to be arriving, and so they see who they’re going to be having this discussion with, two other participants. They’re asked to help set up and they’re asked to just help arrange the chairs in the meeting room. And so in some cases they’ve seen that they’re going to be, if they are a white student, they’re going to be meeting with other white students, or they’re gonna be meeting with black students.

And what the researchers found was that depending on whether they saw white or black students as the other members who were had not yet arrived, that they were supposed to be having this discussion with, they actually arranged the chairs slightly differently. So what the researchers did was they measured how far apart the chairs were placed. They found that when white students thought they were going to be having a discussion with black students on racial profiling, they tended to put the chairs further apart. And this could be seen as a physical representation of this discomfort that we might feel around controversial issues like race.

In this series of studies, the researchers were also able to find a way to reduce this gap between the chairs. And this was an intervention that was based on Carol Dweck’s work on mindset because what they did was they encouraged the students to think about this discussion in a particular way. They encouraged them to think that feeling uncomfortable is natural. That this was going to be a difficult issue to talk about, and people might have some emotional responses to it and so it was perfectly normal to feel a little nervous before the discussion. And that they should view this as an opportunity for growth; that they could learn how to get better at discussing controversial ideas and get better at discussing these ideas with people who might have different viewpoints. What the researchers found is when they gave this learning goal for the discussion that this gap in the placement of the chairs was reduced.

I think this brings us to the important part of this discussion of the implicit association test and our own feelings about certain associations we might have, consciously or unconsciously about certain groups. This is that we should focus on the opportunity to learn from other groups. Rather than closing ourselves off or fearing that we might be charged with racist views, or sexist views, or homophobic views, or any number of other views of that sort. We should focus on how we can learn from other individuals and we can recognize that these conversations can be difficult to have, and they can be controversial, and they can have emotional responses associated with them. And yet if we can focus on learning and trying to adopt other people’s viewpoints and recognizing how they might see things, then we have a chance to grow. And we also have a chance to reduce the possible influence of any negative associations that we might consciously or unconsciously hold. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!