Tatter - Episodes Tagged with “Implicit Bias”

Episode 46: Measure for Measure (Wil Cunningham & Uli Schimmack Discuss the Implicit Association Test)

Michael Sargent — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 06:00:00 -0500

ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Since Tony Greenwald, Debbie McGhee, and Jordan Schwartz introduced the Implicit Association Test to the published literature in 1998, the IAT has taken social psychology by storm, and the notion that implicit bias is prevalent and impactful has taken the world by storm. But to what extent are popular beliefs, and popularizing claims, about implicit bias and the IAT well-supported by the science? What improvements are needed in the science of implicit bias? Does that research qualify as good science? Is it useful? And what does "implicit" even mean in this context? Psychologists Wil Cunningham and Ulrich Schimmack engage with each other and with me in a lively discussion of such issues, including conversation about Uli's 2019 paper, "The Implicit Association Test: A Method in Search of a Construct."

LINKS
--Wil Cunningham's profile at the University of Toronto
--Uli Schimmack's profile at the University of Toronto
--Project Implicit website
--Schimmack (2019), The Implicit Association Test: A method in search of a construct, Perspectives on Psychological Science
--link to a free version of the paper, housed at Schimmack's site
--Cunningham, Preacher, & Banaji (2001). Implicit attitude measures: Consistency, stability, and convergent validity. Psychological Science

Special Guests: Uli Schimmack and Wil Cunningham.

Episode 29: Mission Creep (On Carrying Implicit Bias Too Far)

Michael Sargent — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 07:00:00 -0500

ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Talk of implicit bias has moved far beyond its origin in psychology. It's spread to law journals, it informs training in many workplaces (including one famous coffeeshop chain), and it's entered popular discourse. Does that ubiquity carry risks? What balls are we potentially taking our eyes off of when we focus on implicit bias? These are the kinds of issues addressed in my conversation with Jonathan Kahn, the James E. Kelley Chair in Tort Law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, and author of the book Race on the Brain.

LINKS
--Jonathan Kahn's Mitchell Hamline webpage
--Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Jonathan Kahn
--Project Implicit
--"How the GI Bill left out African Americans," by David Callahan (Demos)
--Racism Without Racists, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
--"The American civil rights tradition: Anticlassification or antisubordination?" by Jack Balkin and Reva Siegel
--"Chief Justice out to end affirmative action," by Jeffrey Toobin (CNN)
--"Sotomayor accuses colleagues of trying to 'wish away' racial inequality," by Robert Barnes (Washington Post)

Special Guest: Jonathan Kahn.

Episode 20: The Humean Stain, Part 2

Michael Sargent — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 15:00:00 -0400

ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Implicit bias has been studied by many social psychologists, and one particular measure, the Implicit Association Test (or IAT) has often been used in that research. It has also been used by practitioners, often for purposes of raising participants' awareness of their own biases. And millions have completed IAT's online at the Project Implicit website.

In this episode, I continue a discussion with six people who have all thought about the IAT, with the conversation covering such topics as (a) how well the IAT predicts discriminatory behavior and other behavior, (b) whether it's appropriate for the Project Implicit website to give individualized feedback to visitors who complete online IAT's there, and (c) the content and effectiveness of implicit bias training. My guests are psychologists Calvin Lai, Brian Nosek, Mike Olson, Keith Payne, and Simine Vazire, as well as journalist Jesse Singal.

LINKS
--Interpreting correlation coefficients (by Deborah J. Rumsey)
--Project Implicit (where you can take an IAT)
--Brian Nosek's departmental web page
--Calvin Lai's departmental web page
--"Psychology's favorite tool for measuring racism isn't up to the job" (Jesse Singal, in The Cut)
--Keith Payne's departmental web page
--Michael Olson's departmental web page
--Simine Vazire's departmental web page
--The Black Goat (podcast on which Simine Vazire is a co-host)
--"Understanding and and using the Implicit Association Test: III. Meta-analysis of predictive validity (Greenwald, Poehlmann, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009)
--"Statistically small effects of the Implicit Association Test can have societally large effects" (Greenwald, Banaji, & Nosek, 2015)
--"Using the IAT to predict ethnic and racial discrimination: Small effects sizes of unknown societal significance" (Oswald, Mitchell, Blanton, Mitchell, & Tetlock, 2015)
--"Arbitrary metrics in psychology" (Blanton & Jaccard, 2006)
--"The bias of crowds: How implicit bias bridges personal and systemic prejudice" (Payne, Vuletich, & Lundberg, 2017; access is subscription-controlled)
--"Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The Implicit Association Test" (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998)
--A summary of David Hume's thoughts on the association of ideas
--Two Psychologists Four Beers (podcast featuring psychologists Yoel Inbar and Mickey Inzlicht)
--Very Bad Wizards (podcast featuring psychologist David Pizarro and philosopher Tamler Sommers)

Cover art credit: "Still Life with Bottles, Wine, and Cheese," John F. Francis (1857; public domain, from Wikimedia Commons, copyright tag: PD-US)

Special Guests: Brian Nosek, Calvin Lai, Jesse Singal, Keith Payne, Michael Olson, and Simine Vazire.

Episode 19: The Humean Stain, Part 1

Michael Sargent — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 05:00:00 -0400

On April 12, 2018, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, two African-American men, were arrested for trespassing at a Philadelphia Starbucks. They were waiting for another person to join them for a meeting, when a manager called the police because they hadn't made a purchase. In the face of ensuing controversy, Starbucks closed stores nationwide one afternoon at the end of May in order to hold anti-bias training sessions for employees. As in this case and elsewhere, the topic of implicit racial bias has captured many imaginations.

Implicit bias has been studied by many social psychologists, and one particular measure, the Implicit Association Test (or IAT) has often been used in that research. It has also been used by practitioners, often for purposes of raising participants' awareness of their own biases. And millions have completed IAT's online at the Project Implicit website.

In this episode, I talk with six people who have all thought about the IAT, with the conversation covering such topics as (a) what kinds of mental associations might be revealed by performance on the IAT, (b) how reliable is it as a measure, and (c) whether or not the research debates surrounding the IAT are an example of good science. My guests are psychologists Calvin Lai, Brian Nosek, Mike Olson, Keith Payne, and Simine Vazire, as well as journalist Jesse Singal.

LINKS
--Scientific American Frontiers episode on implicit bias
--Project Implicit (where you can take an IAT)
--Brian Nosek's departmental web page
--Calvin Lai's departmental web page
--Michael Olson's departmental web page
--Keith Payne's departmental web page
--Simine Vazire's departmental web page
--"Psychology's favorite tool for measuring racism isn't up to the job" (Jesse Singal, in The Cut)
--"Statistically small effects of the Implicit Association Test can have societally large effects" (Greenwald, Banaji, & Nosek, 2015)
--"Using the IAT to predict ethnic and racial discrimination: Small effects sizes of unknown societal significance" (Oswald, Mitchell, Blanton, Mitchell, & Tetlock, 2015)
--A summary of David Hume's thoughts on the association of ideas

Cover art credit: "Still Life with Bottles, Wine, and Cheese," John F. Francis (1857; public domain, from Wikimedia Commons, copyright tag: PD-US)

Special Guests: Brian Nosek, Calvin Lai, Jesse Singal, Keith Payne, Michael Olson, and Simine Vazire.