I highlight three issues pertaining to the Implicit Association Test (IAT). First, using the test’s documented validity estimates, I show that using the IAT to classify individuals can result in lower adherence to a benchmark of rationality than using a blatantly unfair categorization scheme. I also suggest that using base rates to classify people when negligible individuating information is available is rational. In fact, people use racial base rates when executing their own classification strategy but denigrate other people for doing so. Second, I emphasize the very tenuous relation between one’s IAT score and dependent variables such as medical therapy choices which can be influenced by multiple factors other than prejudice. Third, I question the use of the IAT as a basis for deeming a person to be implicitly racist and therefore ineligible to be hired or in need of “diversity training” whose benefits have yet to be established.

The implicit revolution seems to have arrived with the declaration that “explicit measures are informed by and (possibly) rendered invalid by unconscious cognition.” What is the view from survey research, which has relied on explicit methodology for over a century, and whose methods have extended to the political domain in ways that have changed the landscape of politics in the United States and beyond? One survey researcher weighs in. The overwhelming evidence points to the continuing power of explicit measures to predict voting and behavior. Whether implicit measures can do the same, especially beyond what explicit measures can do, is far more ambiguous. The analysis further raises doubts, as others before have done, as to what exactly implicit measures measure, and particularly questions the co-opting among implicit researchers the word “attitude” when such measures instead represent associations. The conclusion: Keep your torches at home. There is no revolution.