Not Science

An Initial Association Test (IAT) purports to signal whether the testee (I nearly wrote something else) displays an inherent bias against something or someone. It’s called “science” (mostly by the charlatans who dreamt it up) but it isn’t, as the redoubtable Heather MacDonald writes in City Journal:

There is hardly an aspect of IAT doctrine that is not now under methodological challenge.
Any social-psychological instrument must pass two tests to be considered accurate: reliability and validity. A psychological instrument is reliable if the same test subject, taking the test at different times, achieves roughly the same score each time. But IAT bias scores have a lower rate of consistency than is deemed acceptable for use in the real world—a subject could be rated with a high degree of implicit bias on one taking of the IAT and a low or moderate degree the next time around. A recent estimate puts the reliability of the race IAT at half of what is considered usable. No evidence exists, in other words, that the IAT reliably measures anything stable in the test-taker.

And it gets better:

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.

In other words, the stats don’t add up, and the subject of the test (racial bias) cannot be established beyond cooking the numbers and faulty projection.

Sound like global warming theory.

If you read the whole piece — it’s long, like all City Journal articles — what will strike you the most (as it did me) was not the bullshit of the IAT, but the degree to which the IAT has become embedded in government and the corporate world.

This is yet another reason why I could never find employment in today’s business world: not only would I refuse to take the test, but I’d also pour scorn on the whole process, loudly. Exit Kim, on Day One at Global MegaCorp, Inc. And I wouldn’t even get a chance to be fired for complimenting some harpy on her outfit, or for carrying my 1911 into the office.

But I digress.

Once again, as with global warming “science”, this whole IAT thing smacks of people having a theory (people are prejudiced / the Earth is over-heating because of SUVs), then creating the pseudo-science underpinning to support and prove the theory. So it’s complete bullshit, just like Glueball Wormening. (Of course, the appearance of “Harvard” in the credentials of one of the IAT’s developers should have been a warning to everyone.)

I should also remind everyone that Heather MacDonald is a statistician, not just a journalist. Hers is the scientific method; what those other two tools are doing is selling snake oil.

4 comments

  1. I’ve been mulling this for a while, and it might as well go here;

    All the Conservative and Libertarian outrage about biased since is a tad misplaced. Science has always had this kind of crap going on. Scientists don’t, in fact, throw out the theory when the facts show it to be nonsense; they cling to the theory until a generational change. This is NORMAL. Not admirable, certainly, but NORMAL.

    The version of Continental Drift theory that was eventually accepted (lots of others had preceded that version) was promulgated in the 1930’s. It took about thirty years – a long generation – for the theory to become the generally accepted Truth. Bluntly; all the elder scientists who had achieved their positions while accepting the prior theory (that continents don’t move) had to die off.

    This is just how it goes.

    1. Which is one of the reason why Feynman wrote the essay “Cargo Cult Science” – scientist can often be prejudiced by previous work and prevailing opinion.

  2. This is yet another reason why I could never find employment in today’s business world: not only would I refuse to take the test, but I’d also pour scorn on the whole process, loudly. Exit Kim, on Day One at Global MegaCorp, Inc. And I wouldn’t even get a chance to be fired for complimenting some harpy on her outfit, or for carrying my 1911 into the office.

    Obviously you’re Doing It Wrong, then. If you’re going to be fired, it should be for something notable.
    Therefore you should lie on the test so you have the opportunity to be fired later for violating some namby-pamby HR clause.

  3. WRT “global warming” and the whole “The Science is Settled” argument (really not an argument so much as a way to try and avoid an argument by claiming victory at the outset), in my line of work (medical insurance) it is fairly easy to measure the “what” but the issue of the why – the term we use is “causal relationship” is always – ALWAYS – an opinion.

    And it doesn’t matter how much data you collect, when you’re talking about something as complex as the weather (or the human body), definitively stating that “phenomenon X was caused by action Y” will always be an expression of an opinion, nothing more.

    The truth is that the climate IS changing. But the other truth is that the climate has never been “fixed” so the statement that “the climate is changing” has always been true and always WILL be true until our sun becomes a red dwarf and the atmosphere is boiled off at which point there won’t be a climate.

    The current “warming” period may be caused by any number of things, including “normal” cyclical changes. These have happened all throughout history (google “Medieval Warming Period” or “The Little Ice Age” for historical examples of warming and cooling periods) and obviously happened long before humans were even around to WRITE history, much less to drive SUVs and crank our air conditioners down to 50 degrees. I’d even concede that there may – MAY – be an anthropogenic component to “global warming” (or whatever they’re calling it this week) but even if there is, the perecentage attributable to human activities is both unknown and unknowable because, as I said above, no matter how much data is collected, unless you have another Earth stashed away somewhere to experiment on, it will always be a statement of OPINION and not FACT.

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