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Implicit Bias

As the evidence mounts that racial bias of whites has declined dramatically over recent decades, bias researchers (biased researchers?) have begun to emphasize a new research tool, the Implicit Association Test (I.A.T.), to argue that whites may no longer express biased beliefs and attitudes and may not think they?re biased but, deep down, they really are. They continue, for example, to associate ?black? with dirty and evil and ?white? with clean and pure.

John Tierney has a fascinating article in the New York Times today (it appeared online yesterday) summarizing this research, and the firestorm of methodological criticism it has engendered. For example:

Last year, a team of researchers at Harvard made headlines with an experiment testing unconscious bias at hospitals. Doctors were shown the picture of a 50-year-old man ? sometimes black, sometimes white ? and asked how they would treat him if he arrived at the emergency room with chest pains indicating a possible heart attack. Then the doctors took a computer test intended to reveal unconscious racial bias.

The doctors who scored higher on the bias test were less likely than the other doctors to give clot-busting drugs to the black patients, according to the researchers, who suggested addressing the problem by encouraging doctors to test themselves for unconscious bias. The results were hailed by other psychologists as some of the strongest evidence that unconscious bias leads to harmful discrimination.

But then two other researchers, Neal Dawson and Hal Arkes, pointed out a curious pattern in the data. Even though most of the doctors registered some antiblack bias, as defined by the researchers, on the whole doctors ended up prescribing the clot-busting drugs to blacks just as often as to whites. The doctors scoring low on bias had a pronounced preference for giving the drugs to blacks, while high-scoring doctors had a relatively small preference for giving the drugs to whites ? meaning that the more ?biased? doctors actually treated blacks and whites more equally.

Does this result really prove dangerous bias in the emergency room? Or, as critics suggest, does it illustrate problems with the way researchers have been using split-second reactions on a computer test to diagnose an epidemic of racial bias?

In a series of scathing critiques, some psychologists have argued that this computerized tool, the Implicit Association Test, or I.A.T., has methodological problems and uses arbitrary classifications of bias. If Barack Obama?s victory seemed surprising, these critics say, it?s partly because social scientists helped create the false impression that three-quarters of whites are unconsciously biased against blacks.

On the other hand, maybe these I.A.T. researchers really are on to something. I implicitly associate the New York Times with bias, for example, and probably wouldn?t have read this interesting article if not prompted to do so by two esteemed readers.

Full post as published by Discriminations on November 18, 2008 (boomark / email).