Implicit Bias Test

Call it "unconscious bias" or "implicit bias", the test to find this seed of racism still has defenders even though no one is sure what it actually tells us:

Over two decades after it was released to the public, a test that purports to measure the biased and prejudiced feelings of those who take it remains a significant part of popular psychology. Yet while its reliability has come under significant doubt in recent years, the creators and managers of the test still defend it as a useful tool.

The Implicit Association Test, released in 1998 by a group of Harvard researchers, may simply be little more than an entertaining quiz rather than a true measure of one’s hidden biases. Several journalists have suggested that the test is not at all a reliable indicator of internal prejudice, even though the tool has been popularized as just that.

A few years ago at Vox, German Lopez wrote on his experiences taking the test. Lopez took the test three separate times over the course several days and received different results each time. The test indicated he had, alternately, no racial preferences, biases against whites, and biases against blacks...

Smith cited numerous studies that have demonstrated varying levels of reliability, with one paper indicating “a test-retest reliability as low as .01 and as high as .36,” another with a reliability of .72, and another demonstrating .54 reliability.

Test reliability is measured on a scale of 0.0 – 1.0, meaning various studies have found the test’s reliability to range from fairly high to dismally low. Smith admitted that this phenomenon is something that researchers are still trying to solve.

“What explains that variability is something that we don’t understand very well yet,” he said.

I've written on this subject many times, and many of those posts are linked in this post.