Tuesday, December 21, 2004

I Can't Tell if This is a Crock or Not

There is never a political psychologist around when you need one.

Invisible bias: A group of psychologists claim a test can measure prejudices we harbor without even knowing it. Their critics say they are politicizing psychology.

INSIDE THE WOOD-PANELED confines of the Harvard Club, about 200 Bostonians gathered recently to tap into their subconscious. Literally. Audience members were told to move as quickly as possible through a series of faces and words projected on a screen, tapping their left knees for a young face or a "good" word (joy, sunshine, love), and their right knees for an old face or a "bad" word (bomb, agony, vomit). It took about 15 seconds for most to finish. But when asked to switch, to pair young faces with "bad" words and old faces with "good" words, the rhythm faltered and the tapping slowed. Audience members shook their heads and giggled. Some threw up their hands.

To the Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, who presided over the event, the demonstration showed that most of the audience -- like most of the people who have been subjects in this type of experiment -- have a harder time associating old people (or nonwhite people, or homosexuals) with "good" when given no time to think. These are all examples of what Banaji calls implicit prejudice, and their importance extends way beyond an intellectual parlor game. Implicit prejudice, she argues, can affect our decisions and behaviors without our even knowing it, undermining our conscious ideas and best intentions about equality and justice.

You can take the "Implicit Association Test" online. There are actually many different tests you can take examining various differences. I took the test on race, and have been informed that I have a slight preference for black relative to white. But there is much about it that doesn't seem terribly convincing. In the test's online incarnation there is an immediate priming issue in that the test is labeled, "This IAT requires the ability to distinguish faces of European and African origin. It indicates that most Americans have an automatic preference for white over black." Wouldn't telling people that before they take the test have some effect on the results?

The test functions by setting up baseline responses, first to just the words (good & bad), and then to just faces (black & white). These two categories are then combined for a test (good words with white faces, bad words with black faces,) and then switched in a further test (good words with black faces, bad words with white faces.) Presumably, the differences in response time is a measure of bias.

However, I can't help thinking that the result I generated was measuring the difference between choosing black faces with my left hand on the first test and with my right hand on the second. Maybe that physiological difference is taken into account in the test, but I don't see how exactly. Another question I have concerns how we process words and images on a cognitive level. Do we process language in the same manner as any other visual stimuli? I do not believe that we do. The test seems to asks you to evaluate images (in this case people's faces) in the same manner as language, and find that, in general but not in my individual case, white faces are more easily associated with "good." But I wonder what the results would look like if instead of using "good words" and "bad words" you used "names of fruits" and "names of cuts of meat"? I get the feeling that if you did the test this way you very well might come up with a result that indicates 70% of respondents have an easier time associating white faces with veal cutlets.

I'm just not sure this is measuring what they say its measuring.

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