Continuation of: Bogus Pipeline, Bona Fide Pipeline
Related to: The Cluster Structure of Thingspace

If you've never taken the Implicit Association Test before, try it now.

Any will do. The one on race is the "classic", but the one on gender and careers is a bit easier to watch "in action", since the effect is so clear.

The overwhelming feeling I get when taking an Implicit Association Test is that of feeling my cognitive algorithms at work. All this time talking about thingspace and bias and categorization, and all of a sudden I have this feeling to attach the words to...

...which could be completely self-delusional. What is the evidence? Does the Implicit Association Test work?

Let the defense speak first¹. The Implicit Association Test correctly picks up control associations. An IAT about attitudes towards insects and flowers found generally positive attitudes to the flowers and generally negative attitudes to the insects (p = .001), just as anyone with their head screwed on properly would expect. People's self-reports were also positively correlated with their IAT results (ie, someone who reported loving flowers and hating insects more than average also had a stronger than average IAT) although these correlations did not meet the 95% significance criterion. The study was repeated with a different subject (musical instruments vs. weapons) and similar results were obtained.

In the next study, the experimenters recruited Japanese-Americans and Korean-Americans. Japan has been threatening, invading, or oppressing Korea for large chunks of the past five hundred years, and there's no love lost between the two countries. This time, the Japanese-Americans were able to quickly match Japanese names to "good" stimuli and Korean names to "bad" stimuli, but took much longer to perform the opposite matching. The Korean-Americans had precisely the opposite problem, p < .0001. People's self-reports were also positively correlated with their IAT results (ie, a Korean who expressed especially negative feelings towards the Japanese on average also had a stronger than average IAT result) to a significant level.

There's been some evidence that the IAT is pretty robust. Most trivial matters like position of items don't much much of a difference. People who were asked to convincingly fake an IAT effect couldn't do it. If the same person takes the test twice, there's a co...

Implicit Association Test (IAT)