If it's easier to place him with the scientists, or there's no difference, that's some evidence we haven't become a cult yet. If it's easier to place him with the cult leaders, we should start worrying.
Really? Don't you think Scientologists would consider L. Ron Hubbard more similar to Einstein than to Jim Jones? I have no data, but I don't imagine cultists develop positive attitudes toward leaders of cults unrelated to their own.
White is associated with light and day which is associated with good, while black is associated with darkness and night which is associated with bad. Has anyone tried an IAT with white and black objects, which aren't faces? If so, what was the result, as compared to the IAT for white and black people?
I don't think this is it, though it was certainly true as our language was taking shape (by candlelight), as seen in the uses of many of our words that contain "white" and "black".
Modern anglophones seem to prefer buying black objects to white in most cases where either would be equally practical. Look at TVs, videos, dresses, cars, etc.
IAWYC, but I disagree with this:
"Carl Shulman would be heartbroken if I didn't mention Philip Tetlock, so here goes."
One interesting proposal of Tetlock's is for an 'adversarial collaboration' where he and the IAT team assign Bayesian probabilities and how they will update in response to specified evidence, then conduct the specified experiments.
Negotiations apparently broke down, which seems to be the usual outcome for attempted high-stakes adversarial collaborations, but I would like to some of them succeed.
Hrm.... What I'm now wondering is how well it works in reverse.
ie, if the IAT has one testing positive for associations they don't actually want in their heads, would training themselves to do more evenly (specifically, working to speed up the lagging side) effectively "break"/even out the associations?
Not by all mechanisms, at least. I practiced with IATs a few years ago and figured out how to mostly get whichever scores I wanted by priming myself. For example, I normally test as moderately prejudiced against African-Americans, but if I fix in my mind at the outset a full emotional picture of what I dislike about myself (I'm white), and tie this into a negative stereotype of white culture, and then think about a couple of particular African-Americans with whom I have positive associations, and tie this into a positive stereotype, and if I kind of keep these associations in mind through the test... I test as prejudiced in favor of African-Americans.
But the effects of priming wear off quickly.
Isn't the priming effect something inherently useful in the IAT? I could see advertisers wanting to test the effectiveness of their ads based on this. You could also test to see which factors most greatly influenced a change in bias based on how the subjects were primed couldn't you? I mean I have at least one study I would want to do where priming vs. controls would be involved.
Hrm, oh well...
Wait, if you do that repeatedly, would you then eventually still find that you have to explicitly prime yourself?
Or what if without deliberately priming? I mean, I'd expect that to actually become faster, one has to build up the right associations in the first place, right? As one optimizes oneself toward this task...
Well, it would be an interesting bit of research to try, imho.
Good point; I wasn't thinking. Keeping such emotional associations in one's mind might plausibly cause the associations to stick over time, and the IAT might give you a yardstick to notice when you'd got the associations evened out.
Also, if there were a particular context where you particularly wanted to avoid a given prejudice (e.g., while you were interviewing job candidates), you might be able to first calibrate with an IAT to know how much priming evened out the associations, and then keep a similar set of primed concepts in your mind while you did the task for which lack of prejudice was important.
Yeah, though actually I was thinking that specifically training oneself toward doing "well" on the IAT would more or less retrain the brain to associate various things, since when taking the IAT, well, you have to make (or break) certain patters, so training oneself to do faster on the IAT (I'd suspect) may shift the various patterns.
ie, over and over training your brain to do that task quickly, well, the actual way your brain might respond to speed it up would be to shift the associations to, well, speed it up. Maybe. (at least, given my profoundly limited knowledge of cogsci, I don't see any obvious implausibility here, but...)
As I said, I'd like to see some experimentation along those lines...
Actually, also I wonder if the IAT can be generalized to the more abstract type of bias talked about here and on OB. ie, can a variation be set up that sets up/activates the various cog biases, and to do well at it one would have to break those patterns somehow?
Actually, you know... "does it work in reverse?" sounds like the type of thing that others may have already thought of. Anyone here know if there's already been some investigation into that?
I tried the online version of the tests, and the priming seemed to me to be built in...
After 40 or 50 training clicks, priming my brain to link "left hand" with "good" and "tested quality", of course it'll take me longer/I'll make more mistakes/etc... when you start juggling the associations around.
Good catch. There is a small order effect on these tests. From the Project Implicit FAQ:
Q: Could the result be a function of the order in which I did the two parts? I had to group one category together with pleasant words first. I then found it difficult when I later had to group the other category with pleasant words.
A: Answer: The order in which tests are administered does make a difference to the overall result in some tests. However, the difference is small and recent changes to the test have sharply reduced the influence of order. Because of this order effect, the orders used for IATs presented on this website are assigned at random. For any data we present, we are careful to be sure that half the test-takers got the A then B order and the other half got the B then A order. With the revised task design, the order has only a minimal influence on task performance. If you want to check whether the order made a difference for you, you can take the test again and complete it if you get assigned to the reverse order. If you do take the test twice in different orders and get different outcomes, the best estimate of your result is intermediate between the two. For more information about the order effect, see this paper
I had the reverse experience... the second part of the test I tried was easier than the first part... so much so that it was scary. The first half, it felt like it was taking forever for me to hit the keys, like I was in a slow-motion nightmare. The second part was like going down a greased slide.
If you would not consider it unspeakably rude to ask, what were the groupings on the first part and second part? because that sounds like it revealed some form of implicit association. EDIT: ignore that, just saw the date
I saw this through lesswrong.com/comments and assumed it was part of the LSD discussion.
I had the oddest reaction to the test: I couldn't take it. As a touch-typist and a Dvorak keyboardist, I could not easily remember where the "I" and the "E" keys were, since the keys themselves remain labeled in the more traditional style. I can't help but wonder if that qualifies as a bias all its own.
They instruct you to rest your hands on those keys, and never remove your hands.
So you only need to find those keys once, before the test begins.
I type colemak, but for the test I temporarily swapped back. The E and I are conveniently spaced out in QWERTY, and you only have to locate them once, as Nebu pointed out.
Politically charged fields are known to produce lots of contradictory studies. For instance, different studies of correlation between genes and intelligence often produce numbers anywhere in the range 0.2-1. So before debating the significance of implicit associations, it would be nice to know how robust are the numbers cited in this post.
a new study out based on the ProjectImplicit tests.
article first http://keenetrial.com/blog/2016/12/19/i-am-morally-superior-to-others-and-also-less-biased-than-everyone/
links at bottom are swamped with referrers
"While the agency and sociability traits were rated variably, almost all the participants rated themselves much higher on moral character than they rated the average person.
In an intriguing secondary finding, while the researchers found that overall self-esteem was not related to feelings of superiority, overall self-esteem was related to a sense of moral superiority."
I wonder about the effects of simple practice on IAT tests. It wouldn't surprise me that after taking the same test a few times, people get better at making associations for that specific content.
That was incredible. I took the gender/careers IAT, and got
Your data suggest a strong association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family.
Whereas I am consciously quite strongly in support of gender equality. It was frightening...
What does being in support of gender equality have to do with your test results?
We'd expect you to have such associations, because those things are statistically linked in our society, regardless of any other factors.
You might as well be shocked that you associated New York City with skyscrapers despite being an advocate of sustainable construction practices.
But building skyscrapers (and high-density cities more generally) is the most environmentally sustainable thing we can do. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/the-lorax-was-wrong-skyscrapers-are-green/
Your main point, however, is right on.
Associating skyscrapers with New York doesn't constitute approval for either.
You might truly abhor racial prejudice and still recognize that black people are usually portrayed in a negative light, and thus "blackness" and "bad" are associated in your mind. That's not being prejudiced as such.
Yeah, I agree with Annoyance. Don't worry about it. It's like nurses - you may not have a belief at any level that nurses should be female, but you'd have to be blind not to notice that they usually are. So "nurse" is closer to "female" than "male" in your thing space.
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 correlation ofabout .6 between the two attempts2. There's a correlation of .55 between the Bona Fide Pipeline and the IAT (the IAT wins all competitions between the two; it produces twice as big an effect size). There's about a .24 correlation between explicit attitude and IAT score, which is significant at the 90% but not the 95% level; removing certain tests where people seem especially likely to lie on their explicit attitude takes it up to 95. When the two conflict, the IAT occasionally wins. In one study, subjects were asked to evaluate male and female applicants for a job. Their observed bias against women correlated more strongly with their scores on a gender bias IAT than with their own self-report (in other experiments in the same study, explicit self-report was a better predictor. The experimenters concluded both methods were valuable in different areas)
Now comes the prosecution. A common critique of the test is that the same individual often gets two completely different scores taking the same test twice. As far as re-test reliability goes, .6 correlation is pretty good from a theoretical point of view, but more than enough to be frequently embarrassing. It must be admitted: this test, while giving consistent results for populations, is of less use for individuals wondering how much bias they personally have.
Carl Shulman would be heartbroken if I didn't mention Philip Tetlock, so here goes. This is from Would Jesse Jackson Fail the Implicit Association Test?, by Tetlock and Arkes (2004):
Measures of implicit prejudice are based on associations between race-related stimuli and valenced words. Reaction time (RT) data have been characterized as showing implicit prejudice when White names or faces are associated with positive concepts and African-American names or faces with negative concepts, compared to the reverse pairings. We offer three objections to the inferential leap from the comparative RT of different associations to the attribution of implicit prejudice: (a) The data may reflect shared cultural stereotypes rather than personal animus, (b) the affective negativity attributed to participants may be due to cognitions and emotions that are not necessarily prejudiced, and (c) the patterns of judgment deemed to be indicative of prejudice pass tests deemed to be diagnostic of rational behavior.
In other words, there are a bunch of legitimate reasons people might get negative IAT scores. Any connection whatsoever between black people and negative affect will do. It could be the connection that black people generally have low status in our society. It could be that a person knows of all the prejudices against black people without believing them. It could be that a person has perfectly rational negative feelings about black people because of their higher poverty rate, higher crime rate, and so on. Or it could be somethng as simple as that, for whites, black people are the out-group.
...this actually isn't much of a prosecution at all. I consider myself a moderate believer in the IAT, and I think it all sounds pretty reasonable.
What most IAT detractors I've read want to make exquisitely clear is that you can't hand someone an IAT, find an anti-black bias, and say "Aha! He's a racist! Shame on him!"3
I think this is pretty obvious4. You can hold beliefs on more than one level. A person may believe there is a dragon in his garage, yet not expect an experiment to detect it. A skeptic may disbelieve in ghosts, but be afraid of haunted houses. A stroke victim may deny an arm is hers while admitting it is attached to her body. And it's supposed to be news that you can give black people some sort of vague negative connotation on a nonconscious level without being Ku Klux Klan material?
There is a certain segment of society which interprets the sun rising in the morning as evidence of racism. It is not surprising that this segment of society also interprets the IAT as evidence for racism. I myself think racism is a bad word. Not in the way "shit" is a bad word, but in the way "wiggin" is a bad word. It divides experience in a perverse way, drawing a boundary such that Adolf Hitler ends up in the same category as the guy who feels a pang of guilty fear late at night when he sees a big muscular black guy walking towards him5. Taboo the word "racism", "prejudice", and any other anti-applause-light6, and a lot of the IAT debate loses its meaning.
Which is good, because I think the IAT is about much more than who is or isn't racist. The IAT is a tool for measuring distances in thingspace.
Thingspace, remember, is the sort of space in which we draw categories7. "Chair" is a useful category because it describes a cluster of things that are close together in concept-space in a certain way: stools, rocking chairs, office chairs, desk chairs, et cetera. "Furniture" is another useful word because it describes another cluster, one that includes the chair cluster and other concepts nearby. Quok, where a "quok" is defined as either a chair or Vladimir Lenin, is a useless category, because Lenin isn't anywhere near all the other members.
Speaking of communists, remember back when East and West Germany got reunited? And remember a little further back, when North and South Vietnam got reunited too? Those reunifications, no matter how you feel about them politically, were natural links between culturally and historically similar regions. But imagine trying to unite East Germany with South Vietnam, and West Germany with North Vietnam. The resulting countries would be ungovernable and collapse in a matter of weeks.
If you associate white people with good things, and black people with bad things, then forming the categories "white and good" and "black and bad" is like reuniting East and West Germany. You're drawing a natural border around a compact area of the map. But being forced into the categories "white and bad" and "black and good" is about as natural as trying to merge East Germany and South Vietnam into the new country "Southeast Vietnermany". You're drawing an arbitrary boundary around two completely unrelated parts of the map and then begging in vain for the disgruntled inhabitants to cooperate with each other.
If you provoke a war between the reunified Germany and Southeast Vietnermany, and watch which side coordinates its forces better, you get the Implicit Association Test.
Why would we want to measure distance in thingspace? Loads of reasons. Take a set of pictures of famous cult leaders, mix them with a set of pictures of famous scientists, and test Less Wrong readers' reaction times associating a picture of Eliezer Yudkowksy's face with either set8. If it's easier to place him with the scientists, or there's no difference, that's some evidence we haven't become a cult yet. If it's easier to place him with the cult leaders, we should start worrying.
Tomorrow: some more serious applications to rationality.
Footnotes:
1: Most of these results taken from this, this, and this study.
2: There's some evidence that priming can change your IAT score. For example, subjects shown a picture of a happy black family enjoying a picnic just before an IAT got lower bias scores than a control group who didn't see the picture. And before condemning the test too much for its tendency to give different scores on different occasions, remember back to your school days when you'd have to take endless quizzes on the same subject. Occasionally just by chance you'd get a spread of ten point or so, and if you were on the borderline between passing and failing, you might very well pass one test and fail another test on the exact same material. This doesn't mean grade school tests don't really measure your knowledge, just that there's always a bit of noise. The IAT noise is greater, but not overwhelmingly so.
3: There's also a fear someone might use it for, say, evaluating applicants for a job. Due to its weakness as an individual measurement and the uncertainty about how well it predicts behavior, this would be a terrible idea.
4: Full disclosure: Despite strongly opposing prejudice on a conscious level and generally getting along well with minorities in my personal life, I get assessed as moderately biased on the racism IAT. I had some memorable bad experiences with certain black people in my formative years, so this doesn't much surprise me.
5: In fact, Jesse Jackson (note for non-Americans: a well-known black minister and politician who speaks out against racism) himself admits to occasionally having these pangs of guilty fear - hence the name of Tetlock's article.
6: I think Eliezer once coined a term for the opposite of "applause light", for things like "racism" and "scientism" invoked only so people can feel good about hating them, but I can't seem to find it. Can someone refresh my memory?
7: I was split on whether to use the term thing-space or concept-space here. Eliezer uses concept-space in a very particular way, but "good" and "black" seem much more concepts than things. I eventually went with thing-space, but I'm not happy about it.
8: This is a facetious example. It's possible in theory, but there would be so much to control for that any result would be practically meaningless.