I See It Coming

My school district has taken upon itself the goal of eliminating racism in all of humanity, and I can foresee that we'll again be subject to the not-very-scientific Implicit Bias Training:

Implicit bias purports to answer the question: Why do racial disparities persist in household income, job status, and incarceration rates, when explicit racism has, by all measures, greatly diminished over the last half-century? The reason, according to implicit-bias researchers, lies deep in our brains, outside the reach of conscious thought. We may consciously embrace racial equality, but almost all of us harbor unconscious biases favoring whites over blacks, the proponents claim. And those unconscious biases, which the implicit-bias project purports to measure scientifically, drive the discriminatory behavior that, in turn, results in racial inequality.

The need to plumb the unconscious to explain ongoing racial gaps arises for one reason: it is taboo in universities and mainstream society to acknowledge intergroup differences in interests, abilities, cultural values, or family structure that might produce socioeconomic disparities...

But the fiercest disputes concern the IAT’s validity. A psychological instrument is deemed “valid” if it actually measures what it claims to be measuring—in this case, implicit bias and, by extension, discriminatory behavior. If the IAT were valid, a high implicit-bias score would predict discriminatory behavior, as Greenwald and Banaji asserted from the start. It turns out, however, that IAT scores have almost no connection to what ludicrously counts as “discriminatory behavior” in IAT research—trivial nuances of body language during a mock interview in a college psychology laboratory, say, or a hypothetical choice to donate to children in Colombian, rather than South African, slums. Oceans of ink have been spilled debating the statistical strength of the correlation between IAT scores and lab-induced “discriminatory behavior” on the part of college students paid to take the test. The actual content of those “discriminatory behaviors” gets mentioned only in passing, if at all, and no one notes how remote those behaviors are from the discrimination that we should be worried about.

Even if we accept at face value that the placement of one’s chair in a mock lab interview or decisions in a prisoner’s-dilemma game are significant “discriminatory behaviors,” the statistical connection between IAT scores and those actions is negligible. A 2009 meta-analysis of 122 IAT studies by Greenwald, Banaji, and two management professors found that IAT scores accounted for only 5.5 percent of the variation in laboratory-induced “discrimination.” Even that low score was arrived at by questionable methods, as Jesse Singal discussed in a masterful review of the IAT literature in New York. A team of IAT skeptics—Fred Oswald of Rice University, Gregory Mitchell of the University of Virginia law school, Hart Blanton of the University of Connecticut, James Jaccard of New York University, and Philip Tetlock—noticed that Greenwald and his coauthors had counted opposite behaviors as validating the IAT. If test subjects scored high on implicit bias via the IAT but demonstrated better behavior toward out-group members (such as blacks) than toward in-group members, that was a validation of the IAT on the theory that the subjects were overcompensating for their implicit bias. But studies that found a correlation between a high implicit-bias score and discriminatory behavior toward out-group members also validated the IAT. In other words: heads, I win; tails, I win.

Greenwald and Banaji now admit that the IAT does not predict biased behavior. The psychometric problems associated with the race IAT “render [it] problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination,” they wrote in 2015, just two years after their sweeping claims in Blind Spot. The IAT should not be used, for example, to select a bias-free jury, maintains Greenwald. “We do not regard the IAT as diagnosing something that inevitably results in racist or prejudicial behavior,” he told The Chronicle of Higher Education in January. Their fallback position: though the IAT does not predict individual biased behavior, it predicts discrimination and disadvantage in the aggregate. “Statistically small effects” can have “societally large effects,” they have argued. If a society has higher levels of implicit bias against blacks as measured on the IAT, it will allegedly have higher levels of discriminatory behavior. Hart Blanton, one of the skeptics, dismisses this argument. If you don’t know what an instrument means on an individual level, you don’t know what it means in the aggregate, he told New York’s Singal. In fairness to Greenwald and Banaji, it is true that a cholesterol score, say, is more accurate at predicting heart attacks the larger the sample of subjects. But too much debate exists about what the IAT actually measures for much confidence about large-scale effects...

The most recent meta-analysis deals another blow to the conventional IAT narrative. This study, not yet formally published, looked at whether changes in implicit bias allegedly measured by the IAT led to changes in “discriminatory behavior”—defined as the usual artificial lab conduct. While small changes in IAT scores can be induced in a lab setting through various psychological priming techniques, they do not produce changes in behavior, the study found.

Don't think I won't challenge anyone who tries to push this phrenology on us.

Maybe We're Not All Racists After All

It was probably 2 years ago now that I was supposed to attend 3 3-hr professional development presentations on "unconscious bias".  Presented by one of the most biased people I've ever encountered--one of the first things she said was that people opposed President Obama's policies because of his skin color--this CTA employee (are you surprised?) used this "Harvard University" tool to show that we're all racists.  I bailed on the remaining two sessions on the training, opting instead to review statistics with several of my math department colleagues who also chose not to attend and thought their time could be better spent reviewing material they'd soon be teaching under the Common Core standards that our district and state adopted.  It's not like my colleagues couldn't teach basic "normal curve" material, but since I teach statistics, we all thought it would be nice to "go deeper" so that they'd understand more than what they needed to teach.  We all agreed that our time was better spent.

So anyway, Ms. CTA enjoyed convincing everyone else that they're all racists.  Maybe the tool she loved so much isn't all it's cracked up to be, and maybe it found what it did because its creators wanted it to:

Since the IAT (implicit association test) was first introduced almost 20 years ago, its architects, as well as the countless researchers and commentators who have enthusiastically embraced it, have offered it as a way to reveal to test-takers what amounts to a deep, dark secret about who they are: They may not feel racist, but in fact, the test shows that in a variety of intergroup settings, they will act racist. This notion, and the data surrounding it, have fed into a very neat narrative explaining bias and racial justice in modern America. Sure, explicit measures of racism have been in decline for a while in the United States. It’s less socially acceptable than ever to say that black people and white people shouldn’t get married, or that black people are less intelligent than white people (though, to be sure, a solid minority of Americans still endorses such views). And yet, more than a half-century after the end of Jim Crow, all sorts of racial discrepancies persist: On average, darker-skinned people have less access to solid education, housing, and health care than lighter-skinned ones, and face various other forms of discrimination. The IAT suggests that, having addressed many of the most outrageous and explicit forms of public discrimination, our progress toward genuine racial equality may be continually stalled or undone by implicit bias.

That is, many IAT proponents argue that if people who don’t feel like they discriminate do, in fact, discriminate, that could explain those disparate outcomes. Maybe some white cops who claim racial empathy are still, deep down, more likely to pull the trigger in an ambiguous situation involving a black suspect than a white one. Maybe white real-estate agents who are proud Obama voters conjure up thin excuses — excuses that feel legitimate to them — to avoid renting nice units to black families. And the data produced by the IAT suggests that a solid majority of Americans hold implicit biases against marginalized groups — which means they are likely to commit acts of implicit bias against these groups...

Those co-creators are Mahzarin Banaji, currently the chair of Harvard University’s psychology department, and Anthony Greenwald, a highly regarded social psychology researcher at the University of Washington. The duo introduced the test to the world at a 1998 press conference in Seattle — the accompanying press release noted that they had collected data suggesting that 90–95 percent of Americans harbored the “roots of unconscious prejudice.” The public immediately took notice: Since then, the IAT has been mostly treated as a revolutionary, revelatory piece of technology, garnering overwhelmingly positive media coverage...

Given all this excitement, it might feel safe to assume that the IAT really does measure people’s propensity to commit real-world acts of implicit bias against marginalized groups, and that it does so in a dependable, clearly understood way. After all, the test is hosted by Harvard, endorsed and frequently written about by some of the top social psychologists and science journalists in the country, and is currently seen by many as the most sophisticated way to talk about the complicated, fraught subject of race in America.

Unfortunately, none of that is true. A pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments. The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such. The history of the test suggests it was released to the public and excitedly publicized long before it had been fully validated in the rigorous, careful way normally demanded by the field of psychology. In fact, there’s a case to be made that Harvard shouldn’t be administering the test in its current form, in light of its shortcomings and its potential to mislead people about their own biases. There’s also a case to be made that the IAT went viral not for solid scientific reasons, but simply because it tells us such a simple, pat story about how racism works and can be fixed: that deep down, we’re all a little — or a lot — racist, and that if we measure and study this individual-level racism enough, progress toward equality will ensue...

The IAT, it turns out, has serious issues on both the reliability and validity fronts, which is surprising given its popularity and the very exciting claims that have been made about its potential to address racism. That’s what the research says, at least, and it raises serious questions about how the IAT became such a social-science darling in the first place.

I've already identified why it became the darling--because it told leftists exactly what they wanted to hear.

Anyway, I really liked the closing paragraph:

Unless and until new research is published that can effectively address the countless issues with the implicit association test, it might be time for social psychologists interested in redressing racial inequality to reexamine their decision to devote so much time and energy to this one instrument. In the meantime, the field will continue to be hampered in its ability to provide meaningful answers to basic questions about how implicit bias impacts society, because answering those questions requires accurate tools. So, contra Banaji, scrutinizing the IAT and holding it to the same standards as any other psychological instrument isn’t a sign that someone doesn’t take racism seriously: It’s exactly the opposite.

Is There *Any* Evidence It Does *Any* Good In *Any* Setting?

Other than making money for race-baiting hucksters, so-called implicit bias (or unconscious bias) training does no good at all:

While these cases have spurred calls for greater law enforcement investment in diversity training, new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that the day-long implicit bias-oriented training programs now common in most U.S. police departments are unlikely to reduce racial inequity in policing.

"Our findings suggest that diversity training as it is currently practiced is unlikely to change police behavior," said study lead author Calvin Lai, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Officers who took the training were more knowledgeable about bias and more motivated to address bias at work," Lai said." However, these effects were fleeting and appear to have little influence on actual policing behaviors just one month after the training session."

Click here for the posts I've written I've written on this topic (and associated links, of course).

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Another study about so-called implicit bias bites the dust:

One of the best-known scientific studies to posit that implicit bias—the idea that all people are unconsciously racist, sexist, etc.—can be counteracted via strategic effort is taking a well-deserved beating. It now appears that the findings were significantly overstated...

My point is that the in an area of research fraught with replicability problems, the orchestra study was supposed to be one of the good ones.

Well, so much for that. In May, Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman took a deep dive into the study. He described them as "not very impressive at all," and had great difficulty trying to locate the 50 percent statistic within the modest findings...

Blind interviews and auditions may be preferable for other reasons. They may even reduce implicit bias in some situations. But as is so often the case, the sweeping claims of social scientists do not seem to survive scrutiny.

Lefties and their fake "science".

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.

Unconscious Bias

Call it "unconscious bias" or "implicit bias" or "hidden bias", the result is the same--whitey is a bad person and is responsible for the racial achievement gap.

I've written about unconscious bias, including some training I had to sit through, in several posts.  Honestly, a quick perusal of these posts would bring you up to speed.

I suppose it wouldn't shock you that I agree with Ben Shapiro on the idea of unconscious bias:

Just A Reminder That The Test Is Flawed

If you're in education and you haven't encountered this yet, you soon will.  Arm yourself with knowledge:

The concept of “implicit bias,” where individuals experience and act upon unconscious feelings of prejudice, has become a ubiquitous part of popular culture. But the basis for the theory of “implicit bias”—a test that purported to prove to people that they were unknowingly prejudiced toward certain groups—has recently had its validity called into serious question.

At The New Yorker earlier this year, Jesse Singal exposed the serious shortcomings and flaws with the Implicit Association Test, a testing mechanism created from professors from Harvard and the University of Washington. And again at The New Yorker last week, Singal offered up more evidence that the test does not deliver on its promises, citing a report from Olivia Goldhill at Quartz.

Don't let them cow you by telling you the test "was created at Harvard". If it's flawed, it's flawed--no matter where it was made.

I wrote about this last April, too.

Diversity Training

Two recent stories at Campus Reform shed some light on what should be obvious about mandatory diversity training:  it doesn't work, either in education or in business.

Let's tackle education first.  Yes, I admit I'm really stretching here, using one data point from which to extrapolate to an entire population.  But if you can find a study showing that certain programs "work", then please mention them in the comments.

A professor at East Carolina University recently discovered that the diversity course she teaches isn’t actually “effective” in changing students’ racial or gender biases.

Dr. Michele Stacey, who teaches criminal justice at ECU, assessed the efficacy of the school’s diversity course by surveying 288 criminal justice students’ attitudes towards women and minorities both before and after taking the course, publishing her findings in the latest issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice Education.

Race, Gender, and Special Populations in the Criminal Justice System is a three-credit course that is required for the ECU major and minor in criminal justice. Aimed at educating students about the challenges of minorities in the criminal justice system, the course covers a variety of topics, including Native Americans and African Americans.

But while the course is also offered in the spirit of helping to reduce student’s bias towards these groups, Stacey discovered something interesting.

After assessing the bias of students before and after the course—using prompts such as “a woman should worry less about their rights and more about becoming good wives and mothers” and “if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites”—Stacey found that the course hadn’t altered students’ attitudes towards race or gender.

Only their attitudes towards homosexuality had changed, she found.

“The results of the t-test indicate that the only significant change over time in the scales was in attitudes toward homosexuality generally,” Stacey reports. “This would suggest that the course has no effect on [attitudes towards women], symbolic racism, or attitudes toward gays/lesbians specifically.”

“Overall, the results of the current study suggest that diversity courses do not have a significant impact on attitudes toward racial and gender minorities among criminal justice students,” she concludes.

Perhaps part of the reason for that is explained by the Harvard Business Review in its article about diversity in the workplace:

Administrators across the country are folding to student demands for more diversity, but a recent study out of Harvard suggests that mandatory diversity trainings are actually making schools less diverse, not more.

A survey in the current edition of the Harvard Business Review based on over three decades’ worth of data from more than 800 U.S. businesses shows that most diversity programs aren’t actually increasing diversity. In fact, the data suggest that diversity programs like the ones seen all over America’s campuses are having exactly the opposite effect.

The study’s authors, sociology professors Frank Dobbin of Harvard and Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University, tracked the effect of diversity trainings on the actual growth of minority populations in businesses over a five-year period, but found that “after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of black women actually decreased by 9 percent, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4 percent to 5 percent.”

The reason, the Review argues, is that managers, business executives, and employees in general are less likely to agree with a position if it is presented to them under mandatory circumstances. Indeed, the Review is not alone in its thinking, citing three other studies supporting the claim that compulsory diversity trainings are met with “resistance and anger” and that “many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterwards.”

That doesn't surprise me at all.  In general, people don't like being called racists (or most other -ist, for that matter), and let's be blunt, that's what happens in so-called diversity trainings.  I recall the 3 hours I spent in "unconscious bias" training, only to learn 2 years later that the test used to find such bias is deeply flawed.  As I stated at the latter link, "I've already identified why it (the implicit bias test) became the darling--because it told leftists exactly what they wanted to hear."

District Pays A Penalty For Insulting Its Teachers

Should teachers be treated this way in order to keep their jobs?  Short answer:  no.  Perhaps the school board in question needs this slap:

Just weeks after Oklahoma's governor called for a special audit of Tulsa Public Schools (TPS), the State Board of Education voted to downgrade the district's accreditation status for violating a law that restricts teachings on race and gender.

In a 4-2 vote on Thursday, the board based its decision to downgrade to "accreditation with warning" in response to a complaint stating a mandatory training session for teachers violated state law 1775.

A teacher filed the complaint with the state after she claimed training videos she was required to watch "...specifically shame white people for past offenses in history, and state that all are implicitly racially biased by nature"...

 

TPS issued a blistering response to the state board's decision and said the schools "are teaching our children an accurate -- and at times painful, difficult, and uncomfortable -- history about our shared human experience," according to the statement.

 

Oklahoma's HB 1775, which does not include the term "critical race theory," is intended to stop discrimination, according to the bill. If any educator teaches that "an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex" or that "an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously," they could be suspended or have their license removed, according to the law. 

 

According to the Oklahoman, the training session the teacher complained about was "provided by a third-party vendor and took place in August 2021, before the administrative rules had taken effect. Those rules advise a school district be labeled 'accredited with deficiency' at minimum if it is found in violation of HB 1775."

If the training occurred before the law went into effect, the BoE's action is inappropriate.  Otherwise, the district has to follow rules just like the rest of us.

I've addressed implicit bias many times, just type "implicit bias" into the search box at the top or bottom of this page to read those earlier posts.  The test used is not very reliable.

"Diversity Training" Is Terrible

I have nothing to add to this article.  It's well-written, well-sourced, and just plain right:

In wake of George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed, many colleges and universities have been rolling out new training requirements – often oriented towards reducing biases and encouraging people from high-status groups to ‘check their privilege.’  The explicit goal of these training programs is generally to help create a more positive and welcoming institutional environment for people from historically marginalized and underrepresented groups.

As I have explained elsewhere, there is a long literature on the benefits of diversity on knowledge production.* However, many of the approaches to training people how to navigate and utilize diversity were implemented by corporations, non-profits and universities before their effectiveness had been tested rigorously (if at all).**

Beginning in the mid-90s, it became increasingly clear that, due to this lack of validation, many widely-used interventions could be ineffective or harmful. An empirical literature was built up measuring the effectiveness of diversity-related training programs. The picture that has emerged is not very flattering.

The article addresses unconscious bias/implicit bias  and microaggressions training, points out the flaws in such training, and identifies the negative consequences of such training.  

Even if your heart is pure, and you genuinely believe that such training is important to organizations and should help people work better together, the conclusions of studies about the actual effectiveness of such training are inescapable:

However, when scientists set about to investigate whether the programs actually changed behaviors, i.e. do they reduce expressions of bias, do they reduce discrimination, do they foster greater collaboration across groups, do they help with retaining employees from historically marginalized or underrepresented groups, do they increase productivity or reduce conflicts in the workplace — for all of these behavioral metrics, the metrics that actually matter, not only is the training ineffective, it is often counterproductive.

Science would indicate that you should believe the data, not your intuition. 

(And for those of you for whom this kinda stuff is important, look at the author's name.)

Those Racist (Union) Teachers

Teachers are a bunch of racists, apparently, since darker colored students have lower educational outcomes and more disciplinary issues than lighter colored students.  Rather than going for the low-hanging fruit of crying racism, though, what if there were an easier, more effective way to go about resolving this dilemma?

Better teaching can improve student behavior and close the racial discipline gap, suggests a new study published in School Psychology Review.  Virginia middle and high school teachers who received coaching in improving instruction referred fewer students for discipline: Blacks were no more likely to be referred than other students.

The “teacher coaching did not explicitly focus on equity or implicit bias, or draw teachers’ attention to their interactions with black students,”  reports Madeline Will in Education Week Teacher. “It was focused on skills in effectively interacting with any student.”

I've always found it entertaining that the CTA goes full bore into the equity/bias/racism sputum, thereby denigrating their own teachers in the process.

Let's Play "Identify The Racist"

Our universities are full of flaming liberals.  Liberals in administration, liberals as professors, liberals as students.  You can't swing a dead cat at a California university and not hit a liberal.  And liberals are the least racist people around--just ask them, they'll tell you.

This professor, though, thinks our students are racists, and his (lack of) logic probably won't surprise you:

A University of California, Berkeley professor suggested scrapping end-of-semester student evaluations for hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions after claiming that the grades and evaluations are biased against female instructors and people of color.

“Over the next few weeks, students will get the chance to evaluate their professors and TAs. They’re going to get it wrong,” UC Berkeley history professor Brian DeLaytweeted on Sunday. “They’ll be harder on women and people of color than on white men. Tenured white male faculty, in particular, should help their students understand this.”

Of all the reasons to get rid of student evaluations, this is one of the least reasonable.

The study, first published in January of 2016, addressed the effectiveness of student evaluations of teaching (SETs). DeLay asserted in his tweet that the study revealed a bias toward gender and grade expectations, such as how quickly an assignment is graded and returned with feedback, rather than a review of the professor’s educational effectiveness.

“Instructor race is also associated with SET…” DeLay said in a follow-up tweet, referencing the study’s finding that minority professors tend to receive, on average, “significantly lower” scores than their white, male counterparts. He goes on to mention the study’s claim that “age, charisma, and physical attractiveness” also factor into evaluations.

Apparently minority teachers are uglier, "slothier", and slower to return graded work--if you're to take this professor's comments at face value.  He asserts there's "implicit bias" at work.  It's interesting how he extrapolated that from the data.

If one of the most liberal groups in the country, that being California university students (Berkeley, anyone?), can't get the racism thing right, I don't know how anyone can expect a poor old white guy like me to get it right.