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5 - Stretching the Limits of Science: Was the Implicit-Racism Debate a “Bridge Too Far” for Social Psychology?

from Section I - What is Implicit Bias and (How) Can We Measure It?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  aN Invalid Date NaN

By
Gregory Mitchell  and
Philip E. Tetlock
Edited by
Jon A. Krosnick ,
Tobias H. Stark  and
Amanda L. Scott
Jon A. Krosnick
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Tobias H. Stark
Affiliation:
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Amanda L. Scott
Affiliation:
The Strategy Team, Columbus, Ohio
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Summary

The attentive public widely believes a false proposition, namely, that the race Implicit Association Test (“IAT”) measures unconscious bias within individuals that causes discriminatory behavior. We document how prominent social psychologists created this misconception and the field helped perpetuate it for years, while skeptics were portrayed as a small group of non-experts with questionable motives. When a group highly values a goal and leaders of the group reward commitment to that goal while marginalizing dissent, the group will often go too far before it realizes that it has gone too far. To avoid the sort of groupthink that produced the mismatch between what science now knows about the race IAT and what the public believes, social psychologists need to self-consciously embrace skepticism when evaluating claims consistent with their beliefs and values, and governing bodies need to put in place mechanisms that ensure that official pronouncements on policy issues, such as white papers and amicus briefs, are the product of rigorous and balanced reviews of the scientific evidence and its limitations.

Keywords

unconscious biasimplicit biasImplicit Association Testmisinformationgroupthinksociology of sciencepoliticizationpolitical psychology
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Implicit Bias and Racism , pp. 149 - 168
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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