Thursday, October 12, 2017

Heather MacDonald: "Are We All Unconscious Racists?"

Nope.
   "Implicit bias" is BS (or, at least, the IAT is):
The implicit-bias crusade is agenda-driven social science. Banaji seems to see herself on a crusade. In an e-mail to New York’s Jesse Singal, she attacked both the credentials and the motives of the academics who have subjected the IAT narrative to critical scrutiny: “I don’t read commentaries from non-experts,” she wrote (those “non-experts” are overwhelmingly credentialed psychologists, like herself). “It scares people (fortunately, a negligible minority) that learning about our minds may lead people to change their behavior so that their behavior may be more in line with their ideals and aspirations.” The critics should explore with their “psychotherapists or church leaders” their alleged obsession with the race IAT, she suggested. Kang has accused critics of holding a “tournament of merit” vision of society and of having financial reasons for IAT skepticism. (Of course, the fact that Banaji and Kang hire themselves out as IB trainers, for “non-trivial . . . fees,” as Kang puts it about himself, and that Greenwald serves as a paid expert witness in discrimination lawsuits, does not lead Kang to impute financial reasons for such pro-IAT advocacy.)

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's good that people are pointing this out, but the psychological community should be ashamed it has taken this long. The entire test structure is BS prima-facie. The idea that the results of it bear any meaningful information should have been laughed out of the room, and even if you were to devote resources to thing on a wild hunch, it should have been rigorously scrutinized (because it is prima-facie BS). But it wasn't for all-too-predictable reasons.

7:04 PM  

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