Measuring Implicit Bias: The Implicit Association Test (IAT)

NARRATOR: Our last episode on implicit memory left you with this point: we don’t know our minds. At least, not completely. But in the 1990s, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji, Tony Greenwald, and Brian Nosek put online the test that would shine light on the hidden parts of our minds: The IAT: Implicit Association Test.

The idea behind the test is simple: Certain concepts… just go together.

MAHZARIN BANAJI: Mother and father; bread and butter.

NARRATOR: That means it’s easier for our minds to connect them. And things that are easier… should be faster.

So imagine this: you sit down at a computer and are shown pictures of flowers and insects. All you have to do is sort them. Sometimes you’re sorting flowers with good words…

MAHZARIN BANAJI: Words like sunshine and love and peace and joy and things like that…

NARRATOR: …and insects with bad words…

MAHZARIN BANAJI: …devil, bomb, war, vomit…

NARRATOR: Sometimes, you have to do the opposite: sort flowers with vomit and bugs with joy.

One version is a lot easier than the other. We all know which one. Flowers with good, insects with bad… these pairings are faster. Maybe just by a few milliseconds, maybe by a few hundred – just how much faster tells you how strong these implicit associations are.

That’s it. They had realized that one way to measure the mind was to measure time. And once they had the test, the questions were endless. Are you more likely to associate good with the Red Sox or the Yankees? With “Young” or “Old”? With “Black” or “White”?

MAHZARIN BANAJI: The first test I ever took was the race test. For half the trials, the light-skinned faces and good words were associated while dark skinned faces and bad words were associated. And I did that one first, and I did that one flawlessly. And I knew that the opposite pairing would be equally easy for me: white and bad, black and good – why should that be any different than the one before?

So I was quite stunned when my fingers almost couldn’t find their way on the keyboard. When I couldn’t keep in mind which had to go where. I made many more mistakes. I took one and a half times as long to do it. By the end of this three-minute experience, I was in a sweat. And my first thought was “something is screwed up with this test, because it can’t be me. I know my mind.”

NARRATOR: But it wasn’t the test.

ALAN ALDA: You’re taking this for the umpteenth time… and you still haven’t caught onto the fact that you’re a little biased? [laughter]

NARRATOR: They shared it with friends and family, students in their labs, fellow scientists at conferences. The results were clear.

ANDERSON COOPER: So when people say ‘well, I’m colorblind, I don’t see color,’ this test shows otherwise?

ANTHONY GREENWALD: Quite a bit otherwise.

NARRATOR: Somehow, the IAT could tap into implicit associations people didn’t even know they had.

JOAN: I… [laughter]

SARAH JAMES: You’re flabbergasted.

JOAN: I’m flabbergasted.

NARRATOR: Mahzarin, Tony, and Brian began joking:

MAHZARIN BANAJI: These effects are so big, you could even pick it up on the Internet.

NARRATOR: And then they put it online — and it went viral.

Since 1998, millions of tests have been taken around the world – and this data is powerful.

The responses tell us that our implicit attitudes… can change. Over the past 20 years, they have changed – at least some of them. This change isn’t something that happens over the course of a single podcast or seminar, but this tells us that with time and practice, we can reshape our minds. And that’s something worth working towards.