Continuation of: The Implicit Association Test
Response to: 3 Levels of Rationality Verification

I've not yet seen it pointed out before that we use "bias" to mean two different things.

Sometimes we use "bias" to mean a hard-coded cognitive process that results in faulty beliefs. Take as examples the in-group bias, the recall bias, the bad guy bias, and various other things discovered by Tversky and Kahneman.

Other times, we use "bias" to mean a specific faulty belief generated by such a process, especially one that itself results in other faulty beliefs. For example, Jews are sometimes accused of having a pro-Israel bias. By this we mean that they have a higher opinion of Israel than the evidence justifies; this is a specific belief created by the in-group bias. This belief may itself generate other faulty beliefs; for example, they may have a more negative opinion of Palestinians than the evidence justifies. It is both the effect of a bias, and the cause of other biases.

Let's be clear about this "more than the evidence justifies" bit. Hating Hitler doesn't mean you're biased against Hitler. Likewise, having a belief about a particular ethnic group doesn't mean you're biased for or against them. My Asian friends hate it when people sheepishly admit in a guilty whisper that they've heard Asians are good at academics. Asians are good at academics. Just say "55% chance an average Asian has a GPA above the American population mean" and leave it at that. This is one of Tetlock's critiques of the Implicit Association Test, and it's a good one. I'd probably link Asians to high achievement on an IAT, but it wouldn't be a bias or anything to get upset about.

And let's also be clear about this faulty belief thing. You don't have to believe something for it to be a belief; consider again the skeptic who flees the haunted house. She claims she doesn't belief in ghosts, and she's telling the truth one hundred percent. She's still going to be influenced by her belief in ghosts. She's not secretly supernaturalist any more than someone who gets "strongly biased" on the IAT is secretly racist. But she needs to know she's still going to run screaming from haunted houses, and IAT-takers should be aware they're still probably going to discriminate against black people in some tiny imperceptible way.

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.

Related to: Never Leave Your Room

Perhaps you are a psychologist, and you wish to do a study on racism. Maybe you want to know whether racists drink more coffee than non-racists. Sounds easy. Find a group of people and ask them how racist they are, then ask them how much coffee they drink.

Problem: everyone in your study says they're completely non-racist and some of their best friends are black and all races are equally part of this vast multicolored tapestry we call humanity. Maybe some of them are stretching the truth here a bit. Until you figure out which ones, you're never going to find out anything interesting about coffee.

So you build a foreboding looking machine out of gleaming steel, covered with wires and blinking lights. You sit your subjects down in front of the machine, connect them to its electrodes, and say as convincingly as possible that it is a lie detector and they must speak the truth. Your subjects look doubtful. Didn't they hear on TV that lie detectors don't really work? They'll stick to their vehement assertions of tolerance until you get a more impressive-looking machine, thank you.

You get smarter. Before your experiment, you make the subjects fill in a survey, which you secretly copy while they're not looking. Then you bring them in front of the gleaming metal lie detector, and dare them to try to thwart it. Every time they give an answer different from the one on the survey, you frown and tell them that the machine has detected their fabrication. When the subject is suitably impressed, you start asking them about racism.

The subjects start grudgingly admitting they have some racist attitudes. You have invented the Bogus Pipeline.