Psychology and the Social Scientific Construction of Prejudice: Lay Encounters with the Implicit Association Test

Jeffery Yen

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Psychology University of Toronto

Jeffery Yen

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Psychology University of Toronto

2013 Abstract

Implicit prejudice, and in particular, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), are paradigmatic examples of psychological concepts and research methods that have recently enjoyed great publicity and accessibility. However, little is known about the possible reflexive consequences of this popularization for the public understanding of prejudice, and by implication, for the formulation of social policy aimed at the reduction of prejudice and racism. Specifically, how does the public interpret and contextualize the claims of the IAT and implicit prejudice? With what social and political preoccupations does this operationalization of implicit prejudice resonate? Furthermore, how do members of the public experience and interpret the IAT as both a scientific instrument and as a bearer of psychological truth? In answer to these questions, this dissertation comprises a report of two empirical studies of public encounters with the IAT and the concepts of implicit prejudice. The first of these focused on popular responses to

IAT research in the New York Times. Employing a discourse analytic approach to reader comments, it identified the social and psychological concerns against which the public makes sense of the IAT. In responding to the IAT, readers drew on skeptical and confessional discourses to position themselves reflexively in relation to its claims. I argue that these

discourses constitute a space within which strong injunctions to self-scrutiny, impartiality and objectivity are established as moral-psychological ideals. Building on these findings, the second study examined the IAT as a discursive practice through a focus on the lived experience of taking the test. Recruited participants took the IAT, and were subsequently interviewed to elicit moment-by-moment accounts of this process. Hermeneutic-phenomenological analysis of these accounts revealed thematic concerns that both resonated with and augmented those in the analysis of public discourse. In particular, the IAT was experienced as a vivid demonstration of the operationalization of "implicit bias". I argue that the test embodies and communicates this paradigm to test-takers, and therefore functions as a psychological pedagogical tool. The dissertation closes by discussing the implications of these analyses for public understandings of, and responses to, prejudice.

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Acknowledgments

This dissertation could not have been completed without the help and support of an entire community of colleagues, friends, family and furry creatures, many of whom I cannot name here. I would like to thank my advisor, Romin Tafarodi, for his unflagging encouragement and wise guidance throughout the PhD process; and the members of my thesis committee: Geoff MacDonald, whose openness and faith in me have got me through some especially dark moments; and Michel Ferrari, whose creativity and insight have helped me shape my ideas in this thesis. My appreciation also goes to my friends and colleagues, Maciek Harten, Charles Hong, Grant Otsuki and Alice Kim, fellow travellers and contributors of ideas on the long PhD road who have helped to lighten the load; the undergraduate research assistants that have joined me along the way and contributed in no small way to the production of this research; and my research participants, without whose patience and willingness to be interviewed I would have no thesis. And finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Alicia, my partner and soul mate. Through many trials and tribulations, your love, sacrifice and support enabled me the privilege of attaining this goal. This thesis is dedicated to “Spencer” (and Reg and Arch)!

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iv!

Table of Contents ...... v!

List of Tables ...... ix!

List of Figures ...... x!

List of Appendices ...... xi!

Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1!

1! Overview and structure of the thesis ...... 1!

2! Context ...... 2!

2.1! Psychology, culture, and subjectivity ...... 4!

2.2! Psychology and ideology ...... 5!

2.3! Psychology in historical context ...... 6!

2.3.1! Trends, fads and the history of social psychology ...... 7!

2.3.2! Skepticism and psychology’s public identity ...... 9!

2.4! Implicit Social Cognition ...... 10!

2.4.1! The prejudice problematic ...... 12!

2.5! Theoretical orientation ...... 13!

2.5.1! Overview ...... 13!

2.5.2! Discourse, culture and power ...... 14!

2.5.3! The analysis of discourse ...... 17!

2.5.4! Science and society ...... 19!

2.5.5! Psychological science and public reflexivity ...... 20!

2.5.6! Cultures of science ...... 20!

2.5.7! Science as culture ...... 22!

2.5.8! Summary ...... 23!

2.6! Historicizing the study of race and prejudice in social psychology ...... 24!

2.6.1! Overview ...... 24!

2.6.2! From “race psychology” to “irrational prejudice” ...... 25!

3! Summary ...... 33!

Chapter 2 Study 1: Implict prejudice, self and society in the New York Times ...... 36!

1! Overview ...... 36!

2! Rationale ...... 36!

2.1! Prejudice in public discussion ...... 36!

2.2! The IAT and public participation ...... 38!

3! Methods ...... 40!

3.1! The New York Times ...... 40!

3.1.1! Reader demographics ...... 41!

3.1.2! Selection of texts ...... 42!

3.1.3! Features of the journalistic articles ...... 43!

3.2! Analytical approach ...... 44!

4! Analysis ...... 47!

4.1! Overview ...... 47!

4.2! Overall themes and features of the corpus ...... 48!

4.3! Analysis of reader comments and discussion ...... 49!

4.3.1! Synopsis ...... 49!

4.3.2! Credibility: IAT skepticism ...... 50!

4.3.3! Credibility: IAT trust ...... 54!

4.4! Summary ...... 59!

5! Discussion ...... 59!

5.1! Dodging prejudice ...... 59!

5.2! The language of bias ...... 60!

5.3! The believer: Confession and expiation ...... 60!

5.4! Further questions for study ...... 61!

Chapter 3 Study 2: The experience of the IAT – a hermeneutic analysis ...... 63!

1! Overview ...... 63!

2! Rationale ...... 63!

3! Methods ...... 68!

3.2! Participants ...... 68!

3.3! Procedure ...... 69!

3.3.1! The web-based Implicit Association Test ...... 69!

3.3.2! In-depth interview ...... 70!

3.3.3! Audio recording and transcription ...... 71!

3.4! Analytical approach ...... 71!

3.5! Methodological issues ...... 74!

4! Analysis ...... 74!

4.1! Overview ...... 74!

4.2! Doing the IAT ...... 76!

4.2.1! Being put on the spot/exposed ...... 77!

4.2.2! Wanting to do well on the test ...... 78!

4.2.3! Feeling moral censure/failure ...... 79!

4.2.4! Feeling offended ...... 82!

4.2.5! Detachment ...... 84!

4.3! The significance of the IAT ...... 84!

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4.3.1! Inaccurate but effective ...... 84!

4.3.2! Racially incongruous/racially specific ...... 85!

4.3.3! Everyday public prejudice ...... 86!

4.4! Integrative analytical summary and interpretation ...... 87!

5! Discussion ...... 89!

5.1! The effectiveness of the IAT ...... 89!

5.2! The test-savviness of research participants and the IAT as pedagogical tool ...... 90!

5.3! Reflexive conundrums ...... 91!

Chapter 4 Discussion and Conclusion ...... 94!

1! The public understanding of prejudice ...... 96!

1.1! The “message” of the IAT ...... 96!

1.1.1! Self-work ...... 96!

1.1.2! Scientific experts and the public domain ...... 97!

1.1.3! Psycho-moral parables in social psychology ...... 98!

1.2! Debate in the legal field ...... 98!

1.3! The IAT and the discourse of “tolerance” ...... 99!

2! Alternatives to implicit bias ...... 100!

3! Social psychology and its public ...... 101!

3.1! Public ambivalence and psychology’s paradoxical position ...... 102!

4! Some reflections and limitations ...... 103!

5! Future research ...... 104!

References ...... 106!

Appendices ...... 130!

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List of Tables

Table 1: Academic works and newspaper articles on the IAT between 1998 and 2012 ...... 39!

Table 2: New York Times articles and comments selected for analysis, with word counts ...... 43!

Table 3: Summary of relevant themes, discourses and subject positions ...... 47!

Table 4: Structure of the analysis ...... 75!

List of Figures

Figure 1: Screenshot of individual test result from IAT demonstration website ...... 40!

Figure 2: Screenshot of IAT result and bar chart comparison ...... 91!

List of Appendices

Appendix 1: New York Times articles ...... 130!

Appendix 2: List of categories and sub-codes from coding of NYTimes data ...... 143!

Appendix 3: Key to abbreviations of article names (alphabetical) ...... 144!

Appendix 4: Information and consent form ...... 145!

Appendix 5: Interview schedule ...... 146!

Appendix 6: Demographic questionnaire ...... 147!

Chapter 1 Introduction

There are not only true or false solutions, there are also false questions. The task of philosophy is not to provide answers or solutions, but to submit to critical analysis the questions themselves, to make us see how the very way we perceive a problem is an obstacle to its solution. (Žižek, 2006, p. 137) 1 Overview and structure of the thesis

The purpose of this dissertation is to submit to examination the social, cultural and political effects of psychological knowledge through the prism of its problematization of prejudice, specifically, implicit prejudice. It represents both a theoretical and empirical analysis of the ways in which this relatively new concept—and its associated practices and techniques of inquiry, namely the Implicit Association Test (IAT)—constitute the problem of prejudice and its social and ethical ramifications in particular ways. The overarching aim of this analysis is to provide a basis for the critical evaluation of its contribution to the field of social psychology, its relation to its public, and to the broader social justice aims of prejudice reduction.

I tackle these goals in three parts: The first, which forms part of this introductory section, is an historically oriented and theoretically informed review of prejudice research in social psychology, the primary purpose of which is to historicize and contextualize the emergence of implicit social cognition and the IAT, and identify the form of its “questions” and “answers” to the problematic of prejudice, in the context of the contemporary ascendancy of (psychological) science in modern cultural life. The key issues I wish to open up here are, what are the institutional and social conditions of possibility for the study of implicit prejudice? The second and third parts of the dissertation are empirical, and tackle different facets of implicit social cognition as discursive practice. Specifically, I will be presenting and discussing the findings of two studies. The first of these studies takes advantage of the availability of new online spaces of public participation in, and interaction with, psychological science, and examines the nature of public discourse about prejudice, the self, and the social world, that ensues upon encountering the concepts, claims and techniques of implicit social cognition. The primary questions of interest addressed by this study are, how are prejudice, the self, and social reality constituted in public discourse about implicit prejudice? As an explicitly psychological construct, how is

“implicit prejudice” appropriated and deployed in public debate on prejudice and racism? What relations between psychology and society are instantiated or reproduced through such debate? The second empirical study examines the Implicit Association Test itself as a mode of subjectification, as medium of interpellation, through an investigation of first-person accounts of test-takers’ experiences of the IAT. The key issues of interest here are the ways in which the symbolic and material aspects of the IAT, its scientific authority, the particular form and content of its tasks, words and images, position test-takers as subjects of psychological knowledge and achieve specific subjective effects. Finally, the thesis concludes with an integrative discussion of these findings and the possibilities for a critical reevaluation of psychology’s treatment of prejudice, as well as the wider implications for the public identity and purpose of psychology in late modern societies.

In the introductory section that follows, I introduce the distinctive thematic concerns that animate this dissertation, and outline the basic coordinates within which these concerns are located. In doing so I emphasize the centrality of the notion of reflexivity in understanding the relationship between (psychological) science and society, and discuss the necessity for an historical perspective on this relationship in order to properly understand and evaluate the cultural and social changes with which psychology is deeply intertwined. I identify social psychology, more broadly—and the study of prejudice in implicit social cognition, more specifically—as especially fruitful domains for the examination of these concerns. I then proceed to briefly explicate the theoretical orientation which guides this thesis, covering the relevant, illustrative literature in science studies and historical and philosophical psychology. Finally, as detailed above, the section ends with an historical précis of prejudice studies paradigms in social psychology in order to contextualize and provide a basis for the examination of the significance of implicit social cognition.

2 Context

Life in advanced liberal democracies is characterized by the increasing predominance of scientific knowledge in personal, social, political and economic spheres (Barry, Osborne, & Rose, 1996; Rose, 2007). Not only has science become a key reference point in informing and legitimating broad-ranging decisions made by political bodies, corporations and other organizations, but it is also—thanks to the greater accessibility, and publicizing of, scientific

3 research—increasingly interpreted and incorporated into public and private self-understandings. Indeed, it appears increasingly difficult to conceive of the very nature of one’s own existence, purpose and future without reference to findings, concepts, and narratives from various scientific fields (Burri & Dumit, 2007). It has also been argued that the modes of perception and forms of rationality that characterize scientific discourse have come to predominate as normative standards against which we evaluate our own sense of ethical responsibility, and indeed, our sense of others’ and our own sanity (e.g., Hacking, 1986). The rise of the biomedical, health and psychological sciences, in particular, has been accompanied by the concomitant assumption by citizens of the “aspiration to pursue their own civility, wellbeing and advancement” (Barry et al., 1996, p. 40). These sciences, and their instantiation in expert professions, have thus become an integral cultural resource and source of authority in what Giddens (1991) refers to as the “reflexive project” of the self, a mode of self-relation arising in, and peculiar to, modernity.

Spectacular advances in the biological and information sciences in recent years have introduced new ways of imagining and conceptualizing life. For example, breakthroughs in molecular genetics, and the possibilities that these represent, have troubled familiar divisions between life and non-life, and between the natural and artificial (Haraway, 1991). Such knowledge has also provided new metaphors through which we understand and relate to ourselves, as when we monitor our consumption of certain foods that are thought to boost the production of certain beneficial neurotransmitters, for example, and come to redefine our experiences in molecular terms. Developments in functional neuroimaging technologies such as PET scans and more recently, fMRI, are transforming how we think about our minds, incorporating and reproducing very specific assumptions about human nature (Dumit, 2004). To the extent that people encounter such knowledge—in the form of new concepts, terms and images—and incorporate these into their self-understanding, they may be said to be engaged in the fashioning of their “objective-self”; that is, the self that consists of “taken-for-granted notions, theories, and tendencies regarding human bodies, brains, and kinds considered as objective, referential, extrinsic, and objects of science and medicine” (Dumit, 2004, p. 7). It has been suggested that in psychiatric contexts, for example, neuroimaging and neurochemical models of mental illness have resulted in new forms of “pharmaceutical” self-experience, in which people who have “internalized” such models come to experience their brains as if on drugs (Dumit, 2003).

2.1 Psychology, culture, and subjectivity

Such subjective, social and cultural effects of scientific knowledge are no less important in what Nikolas Rose (1990) has termed the psy-disciplines, those fields marked with the “psy” prefix— viz., psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis. Serge Moscovici (1961), for example, explored the cultural impact and significance of psychoanalysis in French society in the 1960s. He demonstrated that, far from being an obscure body of theory and clinical practice, psychoanalysis had permeated French culture and subjectivity. In his study he showed how it was taken up, transformed and reconstructed by different social groups in society. Moscovici also analysed representations of psychoanalysis in the mass media, and demonstrated the ways in which such representations were structured by a variety of social, political and economic interests (see also Turkle, 1979). Today, as Moscovici presaged years ago, psychoanalytic concepts continue to structure the ways in which we perceive and relate to ourselves and to others (Parker, 1997).

In the same way, knowledge produced in psychology has become increasingly pervasive in recent years, and the results of new studies now frequently appear in the mainstream media. Psychological discourses are also ubiquitous in written fiction, film, television serials, commercials, magazine articles and advice columns (Herman, 1995; Rose, 1990; Wilbraham, 1997). In contrast to findings in fields such as physics or astronomy, psychological research directly implicates us in its findings, addressing our very subjectivity as consumers of such research. In reading psycho-biological research, for example, we are enjoined to consider the evolutionary basis, or the biochemical and neurological substrates of our subjective experience, and we are urged to understand ourselves, our feelings, actions and intentions at the level of the molecular, the electrical, or of the species. Or rather, more subtly, we are addressed as already composed and possessed of such elements. Thus, discourses in psychological research could be said to interpellate us into particular modes of subjectivity, or into particular identities (Althusser, 1971), thus naturalizing—and making it difficult to think outside of—psychological frameworks for meaningful action (Gordo & De Vos, 2010). The implications of psychological knowledge, in this view, go further than its subjectivizing effects, and extend into the domain of social action. Such concerns about the (unwitting) social-political effects of science have long been a focus of critical analysis, and are not unique to psychology (e.g., Feyerabend, 1976; Gutting, 2008; Harding, 1991).

2.2 Psychology and ideology

While psychological discourses may open up to our view new possibilities for insight and action, they may also close off others, by making them literally unthinkable (Hook, 2001). Moreover, they are also instantiations of the practices of particular institutions and thus their use is always tied up with the exercise of power. For example, diagnosing one’s suffering as “major depression” not only constructs an illness identity with all of its accompanying connotations and social sanctions, but also charts a trajectory through a mental health system in which particular rights to speak, or act, or be acted upon, are disqualified or legitimized (Parker, 2004). More broadly, experiences, processes or entities previously conceived of in social or political terms might, through the reconfigurations of psychology, come to be psychologized, related to and acted upon as chiefly psychological phenomena. These changes have been documented in such domains as management practices in the workplace where the optimization of “emotional intelligence” is being emphasized (Neckel, 2009), in the normalization of family life (see Gleason, 1999 for an account in postwar Canada), in education (e.g., Schmenk, 2005), and in social work (see Garrett, 2010). Such cultural transformations, benign or otherwise, demand closer examination and evaluation, for their potential implications are by no means trivial.

Some obvious and perhaps extreme historical examples that illustrate such potential implications may be found in the psychopathologizing of political dissidents in Soviet Russia (e.g., Bloch, 1991; Bonnie, 2002) and Carl Rogers’ formulation of the solution to apartheid race relations in South Africa in terms of person-centred, humanistic encounter (see Rogers & Sanford, 1987; Swartz, 1986), both of which obscure and reconfigure social/political relations as psychological ones. But such concerns are neither new, nor restricted to extreme historical examples; there is a long tradition of critique of psychological discourse and practice for its potentially ideological effects (see, for example, Marecek, 2012; Nafstad & Blakar, 2012; Prilleltensky, 1989; Sampson, 1981). Social psychology has been especially vulnerable to such critiques, and its ostensibly neutral frame has been argued by some to be deeply embedded in gendered, raced, and classed epistemologies (Harding, 1991; Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1998).

How then, do new psychological concepts and methods (re)constitute and intervene in new or extant social problems and cultural preoccupations? How, and to what extent, are particular fields in psychological research consumed, confronted, taken up, rejected, transformed and/or

6 reconstructed in advanced liberal democracies? What role do psychological concepts, motifs and narratives play in judgments we make of ourselves as responsible citizens, in evaluations of our own mental health, in perceptions of the quality of our relationships, or in our conceptions of what constitutes a “good” society? In short, in what relation does psychological science stand to the modern constitution of ourselves as rational, autonomous, liberal subjects, and to our preoccupations with ourselves as ethical projects, to be monitored, improved and/or enhanced (see Giddens, 1991)? These questions about the social-cultural effects of psychological knowledge production constitute the basic impetus behind this dissertation study.

2.3 Psychology in historical context

Psychology’s central unique feature, from which much else follows, is its necessarily reflexive character. It is not outside its subject matter regarding it objectively, but a direct expression of that subject matter. Psychologists articulate, reflect upon and participate in the psychological lives of their host societies. (Richards, 1997, p. xi)

Scientific fields do not develop and become established only as a result of scientific or intellectual questions; the history of the development of psychology can be shown to be the result of the complex interplay between determinants “internal” and “external” to the discipline. Indeed, as many historians of psychology have argued, psychology is especially and unavoidably embedded in its cultural-political context. For example, Gould (1996) has argued quite persuasively that the technologies of intelligence testing and measurement arose out of an era in which a pervasive biological determinism dominated social thought, one in which “social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology” (Gould, 1996, p. 20). These and various other historical accounts of psychology (e.g., Danziger, 1994, 1997, 2000) demonstrate that particular concepts and subfields in the discipline developed as both reflections and reiterations of the social and political contexts out of which they arose. Furthermore, the uptake of common-sense, colloquial concepts into the discipline of psychology gave scientific warrant to the cultural preoccupations of the time, and the dissemination of psychological terminology into everyday language allowed for more phenomena and experiences to be described and understood in psychologically-inflected terms. This gradual psychologisation of society accompanied the increasing influence of expertise in social life in modern societies,

7 and reflected the growing links between such expertise, political power and the self. More than simply providing the language for phenomena or experiences that were always already there, psychology invites us to new forms of scientifically authorized subjectivity (Rose, 1990; De Vos, 2010).

To view psychological research in this context, then, is to regard it as both influential and imbricated in processes of social and cultural change (or stasis, as the case may be). Such an approach to the discipline of psychology can thus be contrasted with, for example, assumptions that the production of psychological knowledge, first and foremost, merely adds to an inert, and cumulative body of scientific facts about human nature. But as historians of psychology and the field of science and technology studies (STS) attest, the uptake of psychological discourse into our everyday vocabularies comes to structure experience, subjectivity and personhood in very specific ways (Foucault, 1980; Giddens, 1991). It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that psychologists might find in their research that people respond in ways that confirm their presuppositions and hypotheses. Psychology is thus caught up in a “double hermeneutic”, in which “lay” and “scientific” concepts exist in reflexive relationship to one another, and in which a strict distinction between them is especially difficult to draw.

2.3.1 Trends, fads and the history of social psychology

Of course, psychology is a diverse assemblage of theoretical approaches, empirical research and clinical practices, whose various historical paradigmatic “revolutions” have made it impossible to speak of a unified discipline of psychology (Leahey, 1992). Thus, the examination of specific “trending” aspects of the field may prove more useful in answering the questions posed above, than perhaps attempts to understand the impact of the entire discipline. Such an examination might question how and why it might be that particular sub-fields, methods or themes take hold, are attractive, desirable, or popular in a specific historical moment, what presuppositions, values or preoccupations they express, and in what ways these constitute us as particular kinds of subjects.

The field of social psychology has provided particularly fertile terrain for this kind of analysis, perhaps because its rationale and historical development have always been so closely intertwined with its social and political context (Danziger, 1997; Greenwood, 2000; Herman, 1995; Stringer, 1990). Relatedly, its subject matter addresses some of the most intensely personal, as well as

8 urgently pressing, human concerns, such as identity, intimate relationships, and racism. The experience and socially mediated interpretation of these phenomena constitute the stuff of our daily realities, and much of social psychology’s specialized language has both entered into, and been appropriated from, popular discourse (Richards, 2010). As such, it is a field whose knowledge is profoundly bound up with its cultural context, which the “crisis” of social psychology in the 1970s served to highlight (Elms, 1975; Gergen, 1976; House, 1977). This crisis arose precisely in response to the recognition of social psychology’s reflexivity, its entanglement with culture and history. Critiques at the time pointed out, for instance, that psychological theory implicitly expressed, valorized and reproduced the Western cultural ideal of self-contained individualism, which drastically stifled the capacity for psychology to contribute to an understanding of contemporary social problems (Sampson, 1977). Although the critical ramifications of these arguments were not widely accepted in North American social psychology, they spurred the development of new forms of psychology in other parts of the world that attended to the crucial dimensions of power, language and ideology in social psychological life (e.g., Henriques et al., 1998). With the crisis seemingly well forgotten, however, recent decades have seen social psychological research proceed apace, with little or no consideration of such critical issues. Thus the social effects of the dissemination of social psychological knowledge, whether culture-changing, conservative, or otherwise, go largely unaccounted for by the discipline itself.

The analysis of thematic and theoretical trends in social psychology has produced some important findings in this regard. Studies such as those of Herman (1995) and Solovey (2001, 2004) have tracked the very close relationships between social psychological research and political interests of much broader national and international import. Specific topics and trends in social psychology can be seen to have tracked, in many respects, the concerns of post-WWII social stability in the United States, as well as anxieties over revolutionary states during the Cold War (Solovey, 2001). A more recent example would be the rise of positive psychology amidst global concern about happiness and wellbeing as a political economic indicator (see Cromby, 2011a; Yen, 2010). In addition, other more detailed examinations of social psychological methodology suggest that the highly decontextualized and truncated notion of “the social” developed in mid-twentieth century social psychology embodies and reinforces a very specific social ontology, reflecting and reproducing the social psychological zeitgeist (see Danziger,

2000; Greenwood, 2004). Thus, Danziger (2000, p. 345) argues in his conceptual history of experimentation in social psychology, that: the model of social life presupposed by the most popular procedures of the social psychological laboratory seemed to approximate an anomic state in which isolated individuals without historical ties drift from one brief encounter to another.

Such historical analyses remind us that the rarefied field of the social psychological experiment constitutes a social space, like any other, and is framed by presuppositions of which both subject and experimenter may be unaware.

2.3.2 Skepticism and psychology’s public identity

Parasitic though the historical relationship between psychology and society has been, it has also been characterized by a great deal of public skepticism. In this respect, psychology occupies a curiously ambiguous position. For while it is clear that psychological discourse has become especially pervasive in the Western cultural commonsense, it has nevertheless struggled continually throughout most of its short history for legitimacy and authority in relation to other sciences (Danziger, 1997). A pervasive theme that emerges from much of the rumination on this issue in the literature is the concern over public distrust and relative denigration of psychology as an authoritative source of knowledge (see Benjamin, 1986; Lilienfeld, 2012; Wood, Jones, & Benjamin, 1986; Zimbardo, 2004). Public denigration is often blamed on the distorting effects of a sensationalizing media, or on the commercial interests of the impetus towards popularization of psychology (e.g., Lilienfeld, 2012). Some authors suggest that the discipline avoid “airing its dirty laundry in public”, thus maintaining a unitary and authoritative public identity. What appears to go unnoticed in this proverbial gnashing of teeth is that the wish to draw a clear line between psychology and its popularization ignores the ways in which the latter is both inevitable—because of psychology’s entanglement in a double hermeneutic—and has been integral to, the success of the discipline and its visibility in “public science” (see Cassidy, 2005, 2006, for an examination of evolutionary psychology as public science). There are thus some particularly useful insights that can be gleaned about the cultural standing of psychology from the ways in which this boundary, and psychology’s public identity, are managed (cf. Gieryn, 1983).

Such dynamics of public reflexivity, skepticism and boundary management might best be viewed in those psychological fields whose claims are controversial, and where this controversy rests

10 precisely in a field’s ambivalent positioning between affirming commonsense, widely held beliefs about our psychological nature, while also challenging such cultural sensibilities (see, for example, Rutherford, 2000 on the public’s reception of B. F. Skinner’s behaviourism). One particular body of work in social psychology that has stirred considerable public and scientific controversy in its rise to prominence in the last twenty years is known as implicit social cognition (see Greenwald & Banaji, 1995).

2.4 Implicit Social Cognition

Implicit social cognition claims to study and reveal unconscious, unintentional or automatic thoughts, processes and biases. According to Payne and Gawronski (2010), the approach has its roots in both attentional research and the implicit memory paradigm, and although today it mostly retains these diverse theoretical influences, it has become almost synonymous with a set of “indirect1” research measures, most notably, the Implicit Association Test (IAT). As a set of theories and methods that presuppose very specific ontological and epistemological assumptions, it has been highly influential in social psychology in recent years. The field’s development and use of the IAT—the prime instrument through which implicit bias is claimed to be revealed—has arguably provoked the most research activity, discussion and controversy (see Arkes & Tetlock, 2004; Blanton & Jaccard, 2008; Tierney, 2008). For example, a Google Scholar keyword search for the exact phrase “implicit association test” conducted at the time of writing revealed roughly 7600 peer-reviewed articles or chapters published since 1995, some of which have been cited almost 4000 times (e.g., Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). The field has also been making inroads in other disciplines such as sociology (Shepherd, 2011), clinical medicine (Green et al., 2007), and consumer psychology and marketing (e.g., Friese, Wänke, & Plessner, 2006). In addition, concerted efforts have recently been made to incorporate findings from implicit social cognition into state law, workplace practices, law enforcement, and the writing of social policy (Gove, 2011; Kang & Banaji, 2006; Nosek & Riskind, 2012).

The emergence of this field is therefore of special interest and relevance to a reflection on psychology’s public identity, since its research findings have been highly publicized and

1 Although termed “indirect”, in fact, such measures are often argued to provide a more direct route to people’s predispositions by bypassing their conscious equivocations.

11 debated, not only in the classroom, but also in the mainstream media. Much of this attention and public ire has centred on the field’s claims about the pervasive, “hidden” and automatic nature of racial prejudice in the United States (Cottrell, 2009; see, for example, Kelley, 2009). Recently, the field garnered considerable media publicity immediately prior to the 2008 U.S. elections when the IAT’s main proponents cast doubt on the likelihood of Barack Obama’s election, given their evidence of widespread implicit race prejudice (e.g., Kristof, 2008). With the 2012 elections approaching, the IAT has continued to generate media interest (see Herbert, 2012). In addition, perhaps the best known and most high-profile popularization of the field may be found in the best-selling book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell (2005), in which research findings in the field are translated and narrativized for a “general audience”.

It has not only been the traditional media that have closed the gap between implicit social cognition and its public. There has also been unprecedented public engagement with the IAT itself, which tends to be highly unusual for psychological research instruments. The test has been made available for public use through a “demonstration website” (implicit.harvard.edu) since September 1998 (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002). On this website anyone can take a variety of different IATs designed to detect one’s implicit biases for race, gender, age, or culture, to name a few. Thus, a significant and unique feature found in the media coverage of the IAT has been the frequent invitation to the public—often in anticipation of their skepticism—to take the test online themselves. This unusual online visibility and accessibility have made the IAT extremely popular: by early 2012 the test had been taken by people from around the world over 13 million times (Nosek & Riskind, 2012).

Given the considerable popular appeal of the field—as well as the far-reaching implications for our understanding of ourselves, and of the critical and intractable problem of prejudice—it would be important to study the ways in which implicit prejudice research both reflects and intervenes in the public discourse on these subjects. Such an inquiry would entail examining how exactly the expert knowledge claims of implicit psychology are constructed, what implications such claims have for notions of ethics and agency in relation to prejudice, and how such claims are contested, negotiated and/or taken up in public discourse. Such an analysis—as will be conducted in the first of this dissertation’s empirical studies—might illuminate the nature of the relationship between social psychology and its public that is instantiated by the introduction of

12 this new field, as well as the numerous sites of interaction and interface provided by its public face.

2.4.1 The prejudice problematic

While implicit social cognition and the IAT constitute a more general research paradigm that has been applied to a variety of social psychological questions, as I have shown above, their emergence and currency are inextricably bound up in their specific problematization of the psychology of prejudice (see, for example, Devine, 1989 and Payne & Gawronski, 2010). It is thus impossible to neatly disentangle the subject matter of prejudice from the research paradigm, nor, as I shall argue, from the discipline of social psychology as a whole. The scope of this dissertation therefore necessarily encompasses an examination of how the IAT is both framed by, and helps to shape, the way that prejudice is conceptualized, problematized and acted upon, in addition to the more general concerns of its implications for human agency and responsibility. Throughout this thesis, I will attempt to examine the ways in which the IAT and the notion of implicit prejudice emerge not only as responses to specific theoretical and methodological problems in social psychology, but also to the quandaries of race relations within North America.

In general, the IAT appears to intervene in the problem of a seeming contradiction in modern- day racism: on the one hand, racism is celebrated as having been largely eradicated both in the legal and institutional frameworks of Western societies, as well as in the reduction of incidences of open and hostile expression of racist sentiments. Furthermore, racial attitude surveys, particularly in the United States, have shown a general trend towards the widespread endorsement of principles of racial equality and integration (Bobo, 2001). On the other hand, it is argued, prejudice continues to be evident in both objective life indices such as income and health disparities, and in everyday interactions between “races”—only in a submerged, “mutated” form (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2008, p. 49). In the social sciences this apparent contradiction is seen to indicate a form of “new racism” (Hopkins, Reicher, & Levine, 1997), and attention has turned in recent years to considering the ways in which racism or prejudice need not necessarily entail either antipathy or negative stereotypes (e.g., Rudman, 2005), but rather may also result from more abstract, moralistic resentments, endorsement of conservative political views, positive stereotypes, ambivalence, or unconscious negative feelings (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004; Durrheim & Dixon, 2004; Rudman, 2005). Within the context of the widespread sanctioning of

13 egalitarianism, and the decline of “traditional” prejudice, several alternative formulations have been proffered in the social sciences and in psychology. These alternatives are outlined in the theories of symbolic (Kinder & Sears, 1981), modern (McConahay, 1983), or aversive (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004) racism, and implicit prejudice (Banaji & Greenwald, 1994). Each of these alternatives problematizes racism and human subjectivity in more or less divergent ways, rendering it visible and amenable to action in different ways. The scope of this dissertation therefore includes not only an exploration of the social and cultural implications of implicit social cognition and the IAT, but also an evaluation of their political ramifications for “prejudice reduction” or anti-racist efforts.

2.5 Theoretical orientation

It's not so much a matter of knowing what external power imposes itself on science, as of what effects of power circulate among scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime of power, and how and why at certain moments that regime undergoes a global modification. (Foucault, 1980, pp. 112-113)

2.5.1 Overview

This dissertation is guided by a social constructionist2 and broadly defined critical realist theoretical orientation. As such, it treats scientific psychological concepts and theories, as well as the psychological phenomena described by them, as fundamentally shaped by socially mediated processes of signification. Thus, the usually taken-for-granted objects, concepts, categories and narratives of our daily lives, as well as those of psychological science, are seen as constructions peculiar to specific cultural, geographical and historical moments. This does not imply either a relativism or nihilism with respect to knowledge, and taking this perspective does not mean that such constructions are any less “real” or efficacious. Their potency is inherent precisely in their instantiation in specific social practices, in their cultural, legal and institutional supports, and in their relations to what counts as “truth” in our society.

2 There is an important distinction to be made here between constructionism and constructivism, two terms which in psychology are commonly mistaken for each other. The latter is derived from the personal construct psychology of George Kelly (1955) and retains a cognitivist perspective that is unrelated to much of social constructionism.

The purpose of this section is to provide a brief explication of this position and its relevance for the concerns of this dissertation. In doing so, I summarize the theoretical resources from which this position is derived, and review a selection of relevant literature to demonstrate the ways in which this basic orientation to knowledge has been applied to the sciences in general, and to psychology in particular. My intention here is to outline a frame within which to think about implicit social cognition and the IAT—a frame which allows for the posing of particular questions about its conditions of possibility, and its unspoken raison d’être. More detailed elaborations of the methodological implications of this discussion are provided in the empirical chapters to be found later in this dissertation.

2.5.2 Discourse, culture and power

The frameworks that inform this dissertation rest on a view of language as social practice. An array of social scientists, theorists and continental philosophers have—since the 1960s— emphasized the ways in which language is both performative and constitutive. Performativity refers to the fact that we do important things with language, ranging in social complexity from making requests (e.g., Searle, 1969), to managing relationships, to the performance of gendered identity (e.g., Butler, 1990). Second, much of the performative power of language inheres in its constitutive and rhetorical aspects, that is, in the ways in which language “forms the world as it represents it” (Wetherell, 2001, p. 16). Language is a mode of action, and furthermore, it is “always a socially and historically situated mode of action, in a dialectical relationship with other facets of ‘the social’ (its ‘social context’)—it is socially shaped, but it is also socially shaping or constitutive” (Fairclough, 1993, p. 134, author’s italics). As the discursive psychologist Margaret Wetherell argues: … Racism is not first a state of mind and then a mode of description of others. It is a psychology (internal monologue/dialogues and modes of representing) that emerges in relation to public discourse and widely shared cultural resources. Similarly, inequality is not first a fact of nature and then a topic of talk. Discourse is intimately involved in the construction and maintenance of inequality. Inequality is constructed and maintained when enough discursive resources can be mobilized to make colonial practices of land acquisition, for instance, legal, natural, normal, and “the way we do things” (Wetherell, 2003, p. 13).

Our accounts of things construct social and moral worlds as real, inevitable or natural, in such a way as to privilege certain interpretations, evaluations and courses of action, while excluding others. In this view, language is not a transparent medium, a direct route to people’s real feelings

15 or the true course of events; rather, language carries with it the weight of culture, ideology and power. Our accounts of things—however neutral or objective they may seem—presuppose and invoke social worlds within which those accounts make sense. Since alternative accounts of the social world are possible, how is it that certain accounts, rather than others, come to dominate forms of meaning making in a society rather than others? According to Jørgensen and Phillips (2002), the fixation of meaning in discourse represents a reduction of possibilities, an exclusion of other possible meanings.

Thus, it is not inconsequential, for example, to ask how and why it is that biomedical, psychiatric discourses are increasingly invoked in constituting odd or aberrant behavior as psychopathological disorders that must be categorized, measured and controlled (Foucault, 1964/1988). This question illustrates another important facet of the social shaping of language— that it is neither monolithic nor mechanical (Fairclough, 1993). A variety of contrasting, even competing, discourses can coexist, sustained by the institutions and social relations in any given society. At the same time, normative conventions do not straightforwardly shape or determine particular instances of language use. It is this possibility for “inappropriate” use of language—to put it crudely—that offers the potential for more subversive and transformative forms of social practice.

A further example is illustrative: as I write this dissertation, students in Montreal, Canada, have been protesting increases in tuition fees as well as the erosion of civil liberties for over 120 days. Media coverage of these protests has been varied, divergent, and controversial. Consider, for example, the different implications for how students’ collective action is framed when it is described as “protest”, “demonstration” or “rally” (e.g., The Globe and Mail, Perreaux, 2 June 2012), as opposed to “unrest”, “anarchy” or “riot” (e.g., The Toronto Sun, Editorial, 23 May 2012). The former terms confer a political legitimacy on the action, while the latter immediately imply a sense of randomness to events, while opening the way to framing student gatherings in the image of the impulsive, undifferentiated, and dangerous crowd (c.f. Le Bon, 1897; Reicher, 1987). Through such language forms, accounts of events, people, or the social world can be made to appear as unitary, objective, and coherent descriptions of the phenomena in question. However, this seeming transparency is a feat of language, and the “innocent appearance of straightforward explanation arising from literal description must therefore be seen as an ‘achievement’” (Potter, Stringer, & Wetherell, 1984, p. 93) of a particular way of framing events.

The media provide the most obvious examples of the ways in which ideology functions through representation, and it would be tempting to think that this only occurs in public or “mediated” language, such as that found in the mass media or official documents. However, the most private of our communications are also subject to culture and power. For example, close analyses of talk between couples in intimate heterosexual relationships have demonstrated how ideologies of gender difference (viz., the naturalization of male sex drive and of female “nesting”) are reproduced in their talk, having profound implications for their positions in the relationship and the “thinkability” of certain courses of action (see Hollway, 2001). Here the notion of subject position is particularly useful, for it captures the ways in which discourse is also constitutive of our subjectivity. According to Davies and Harré (1990), the constitutive force of each discursive practice lies in its provision of subject positions. A subject position incorporates both a conceptual repertoire and a location for persons within the structure of rights for those that use that repertoire. Once having taken up a particular position as one's own, a person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point of that position and in terms of the particular images, metaphors, storylines and concepts which are made relevant within the particular discursive practice in which they are positioned (p. 46).

[Positioning] is the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines. There can be interactive positioning in which what one person says positions another. And there can be reflexive positioning in which one positions oneself (p. 48).

In this sense, language shapes the particular kinds of relationship, or social bond that are possible, by both enabling and constraining the positions one may assume within it. There is also an important sense—not fully captured in the above quotations—in which we may not be fully aware of, or able to control, the implications of our language. For example, describing one’s suffering as “mental illness” may not only construct “an image of the self as a medical object but also construct a certain kind of career through the mental health system” (Parker, 2004, p. 90). Thus, the notion of subject positioning also entails the recognition that we are both active, agentic users of language, as well as being subject to—or spoken by—language.

To sum up, language use is thus always “simultaneously constitutive of (i) social identities, (ii) social relations, and (iii) systems of knowledge and belief” (Fairclough, 1993, p. 134). The implications of such a viewpoint reach beyond those for the mass media as well as our everyday social life, and into the history of ideas and of science.

2.5.3 The analysis of discourse

Up to this point, I have used the terms language and discourse interchangeably, but the latter term has a very specific theoretical significance for this dissertation. Its theoretical elaboration has been central to analyses of the inter-implication of language, culture and power in modern society. As an object of study, discourse denotes “an individualizable group of statements” (Foucault, 1969/2002, p. 90), that is, “groups of utterances which seem to be regulated in some way and which seem to have a coherence and a force to them in common” (Mills, 2004, p. 6). As such, it would be possible to speak of a “discourse of liberalism”, “racist discourse” or “medical discourse”, for example. In each case, a particular set of assumptions, ideologies and institutions gives these discourses both coherence and force.

Although theories of discourse are numerous and divergent, some of the most fruitful formulations have encompassed not only the symbolic, signifying dimension of discourse, but also its incarnation in material practices and objects. Michel Foucault’s development of the concepts of discourse and discursive practices (Foucault, 1981) has been highly influential in this regard, and my approach draws considerably from his work, and that of his commentators (Fairclough, 1993; Hook, 2001; Parker, 1992). Foucault’s work is particularly pertinent here too because it does not attend only to the contents of discourse per se, but to the order of discourse, that is, a “discrete realm of discursive practices… a conceptual terrain in which knowledge is formed and produced” (Hook, 2001, p. 522). As Hook (2001) further elaborates, these discursive practices constitute the a priori rules, systems, procedures and categories of knowledge, and their effect is to make it impossible to think outside of, or beyond them. In this way, discourse both enables and constrains what may be said or thought or written, and its rules permit what may or may not be accorded the status of knowledge or truth, and thus determines the basis on which truthful statements can be made in a particular era or society. Discursive rules are therefore closely linked with the exercise of power in society, and so discourse can be socially constitutive in both normative, socially reproductive ways, and also in socially transformative ways (Fairclough, 1993). Foucault referred to the constellation of discursive rules that governed or provided the conditions of possibility for the production of knowledge in a given epoch as an episteme. He argued that the episteme of the modern Enlightenment epoch was in many respects dominated by science and its discursive practices. According to Foucault, then, science is a

18 key—though by no means exclusive—arbiter and source of truth in the era in which we now find ourselves.

There is another sense in which the term discourse is used in this dissertation, which differs slightly from that formulated by Foucault. This is a usage developed in the field of discursive psychology (Potter, 2003), and refers to the ways in which our language cannot but draw from culturally shared ways of making sense, or “interpretive repertoires” (Wetherell & Potter, 1993). Examples of such use would be Hollway’s (2001) “have-and-hold” discourse, or Wetherell and Potter’s (1993) “culture-as-therapy” discourse. In this view, the study of discourse is also the study of the common sense(s) of a society, and as such, may also illuminate ideological processes and dilemmas (Billig, 2001; Fairclough, 2005; Wetherell, 2003).

In the context of this thesis, then, an analysis of the discourse of implicit social cognition would attempt to ascertain exactly what kinds of social practice or social action are constituted in its discourse in sites such as the academic literature, its research methods, its representation in journalistic and popular media, and in public discussion. That is, it would identify the psychosocial and moral “worlds” within which implicit social cognition makes sense, and which the field presupposes, evokes, or enjoins us to construct. It would also attempt to elucidate how such social action is accomplished through linguistic features of talk and text (such as style, grammar, idiom), and how their rhetorical organization works to anticipate, incorporate and/or compete with alternative accounts (Billig, 1991). Furthermore, attention to the materiality of implicit social cognition would entail examining what specific type of discursive practice is enacted in its procedures and techniques (viz., the Implicit Association Test). The adoption of such an approach therefore opens up a number of analytic possibilities. It allows us to begin to examine, in the more Foucauldian framework of knowledge/power, the contours of the discursive practices of social psychology and the field of implicit social cognition and enquire as to their conditions of possibility. That is, we can ask what are the implicit rules, historical conditions, cultural and political sensibilities that enable and constrain them? What do they enable us to think, and what possibilities do they exclude from thought? From the standpoint of discursive psychology, we can also examine particular discursive events—instances of language use—to ask how particular effects of truth and social effectiveness are achieved rhetorically.

Having briefly outlined the concepts that are central to my theoretical approach, I turn now to relevant examples of the ways in which a basic discursive sensibility has been applied in the anthropological/sociological study of science, with a particular focus on social psychology.

2.5.4 Science and society

For many psychologists, the most common frame of reference evoked by the juxtaposition of the terms “science”, and “society”, is that popularized by the 1969 president of the American Psychological Association, George A. Miller. In his presidential address (1969), Miller characterizes psychology as a “revolutionary” science that psychologists have a moral duty to disseminate and apply to social problems in the interests of human welfare: “The heart of the psychological revolution will be a new and scientifically based conception of man as an individual and as a social creature” (1969, p. 1067). In this view, “science” is unidirectionally applied to “society”, with the aim of disabusing the public of old wives’ tales, debunking myths, and teaching scientific thinking, and thereby contributing to society’s growth and enlightenment. However, as I have already cursorily discussed in the preceding sections, this relationship is a far more complicated, ambivalent and reflexive one.

In what follows, I will argue that the question of how the public receives, interacts with and understands implicit social cognition and the IAT is not simply a matter of determining how accurately or correctly its concepts, theories and controversies are grasped by laypeople—a concern which continues to exercise many psychologists, including the influential American Psychological Association (see, for example, Lilienfeld, 2012; Salzinger, 2002). There are two themes—one of which I have touched on already—that complicate the relationship between psychology and society that I wish to draw out and discuss more fully in this section. The first is public reflexivity, the study of which has shown that the effects of the dissemination of scientific knowledge has little to do with inculcating “scientific thinking” or “objectivity” on the part of the public (Wynne, 1993). The second is of science, and psychology, as cultural activities, and much like other kinds of cultural activity, they operate not only according to the logic of the scientific method, but also, and in some cases quite strikingly, according to a variety of local or distributed cultural logics tied to academic discipline, geographical location and political economy. Their knowledge, furthermore, has the potential to effect significant changes in contemporary culture.

2.5.5 Psychological science and public reflexivity

The prevailing view held by psychologists on the relationship between psychology and society is based on a “deficit model”. In this model, the public is seen as deficient in scientific knowledge or rationality, resulting in poor understanding, skepticism and lack of support for psychological science (Lilienfeld, 2012). The sociologist of science Brian Wynne (1993) has argued persuasively that this perspective—as prevalent among psychologists as it continues to be—is fundamentally flawed: contemporary science skepticism reflects not blind ignorance, but wider cultural processes indicative of both greater knowledge of science, and a reflexive re-evaluation of the instrumental scientific rationality upon which modern institutions are based (see Beck, 1992). The deficit model is based on the unquestioned self-image of science as the bastion of unrelenting modern reflexivity, willing and able to examine critically its own founding assumptions. However, the public, in this discourse, is seen as its polar opposite: “security- minded, imbued with traditional modes of thought assimilated by authority and socially sustained credulity rather than by fearless open-minded critical testing” (Wynne, 1993, pp. 323- 324). The empirical veracity, or otherwise, of this dichotomous opposition is beside the point; more importantly, it sustains an a priori suspicion of the public and an ironic blindness on the part of scientists both to their own taken-for-granted identity and to the legitimacy of public questioning of science, while underestimating the public’s capacity for sophisticated thinking (See, for example, Lave, 1988; Morawski, 1992). Important attempts to deconstruct this dichotomy have focused on the notion that “knowledge products or technical products ‘construct the user’ by shaping themselves around the founding assumptions about user-situations, the public, or relevant social worlds” (Wynne, 1993, p. 322).

With this basic analytic strategy in mind, I turn now to selected empirical research in science studies which represents work that blurs the polar opposition between science and society, and highlights important questions to ask of scientific activity.

2.5.6 Cultures of science

In contrast to hermetic images of science as largely sealed off from society, science can be understood as a type of cultural activity in itself, structured by normative social conventions that are tied to particular communities of practice. Several studies in this vein argue that the construction of scientific facts does not occur exclusively through the application of logic and

21 deduction, but rather, through a variety of cultural conventions and material conditions prevalent within science in general, and specific laboratories in particular (e.g., Latour & Woolgar, 1986). An important aspect of some of this work focuses on the material culture of science—the ways in which scientific objects, instruments, machines and techniques constitute central parts of researchers’ cultural practices. Anthropologists studying the material culture of science have argued that the knowledge objects that scientists actually work on are highly artificial, produced through complex practices that are tied to the instruments used in their measurement or visualization. For example, according to Lynch (1985), … data displays, in the form of graphs, photographs, charts and diagrams, constitute the material form of scientific phenomena. By ‘material’ I mean sensible, analyzable, measurable, examinable, manipulatable and ‘intelligible’. Although the procedures for making the object scientifically knowable implicate an independent object, they simultaneously achieve a graphic rendering of the object’s materiality (p. 43).

Crucially, a focus on materiality highlights the ways in which instruments and methods of measurement constrain, transform and construct phenomena to make them amenable to study, and consequently how these new constructions are inextricable from our interpretations of the original phenomena (Galison, 1999; Lynch, 1985). Furthermore, the comprehensibility and efficacy of scientists’ constructions depend on cultural conventions for making and understanding objects of knowledge, such as images or charts, for example (Wise, 2006). These issues can be observed in the growing visibility and popularization of brain imaging. The final, vivid, and striking visual images and simulations of brain function are the end result of an interdisciplinary feat of medical, engineering, statistical and computer expertise. However, the artificial nature of brain imagery recedes into the background while we are seduced by the immediate visual reality of the brain which draws us imperceptibly into a neurobiological ontology (Beaulieu, 2002; Dumit, 2004). Similarly, and perhaps far more readily, the phenomena studied by psychologists can be fruitfully examined as scientific artifacts whose construction is tied to instruments such as psychometric scales, questionnaires, and their modes of administration (increasingly, the computer). From this angle, we might begin to consider, for example, how the computer-based administration of the IAT is able to achieve specific effects because of the ubiquity of human-computer interfaces and video games in material culture.

Of course, scientific activity has also been examined in its more semiotic dimensions, much of which is centred around the notion of objectivity (Daston & Galison, 2007). For example, studies

22 of high energy physics laboratories (Traweek, 1992) and of nanoscientists in Sweden (Johansson, 2008) highlight the manner in which the repudiation of “culture”—seen as “subjective” and therefore inimical to objective science proper—has consequences for the subjectivities of scientists themselves as well as the ways in which they see themselves as producers of knowledge. This “culture of no culture” is embodied in their pursuit of machine-like rational consciousness and their perceptions of their research as free from preconceptions. Similarly, in social psychology, these themes are played out in the training of psychological researchers, where the disputed—by some—scientific status of the discipline, combined with a powerful imperative toward objectivity, can have some especially challenging implications for trainee researchers (Yen & Tafarodi, 2011).

2.5.7 Science as culture

Science participates in culture by producing, reproducing and/or challenging it (Franklin, 1995). More profoundly, it is argued that science, and scientific ontologies and epistemologies define, and have become integral to modern life. It has now been demonstrated with respect to a variety of sciences that the permeation of their discourses and practices into everyday sense-making have had profound implications for how we understand ourselves, our relations to the natural and social worlds, and our ethical possibilities. These issues can clearly be seen in investigations of the impact of recent developments in fields like genetics (e.g., ten Have, 2001), computer science and robotics (e.g., Turkle, 1995, 2005, 2011), and the neurosciences (e.g., Frazzetto & Anker, 2009; Vidal, 2007). Following Foucault, such studies show how scientific knowledge is reshaping life, work and language, not only in terms of shifts in “culture”, but as effects of power. With reference to the almost Copernican significance of the Human Genome Project, the anthropologist Sarah Franklin avers, the renaming of life as a language, and its subjection to the scientific labor of decoding, with a view to changing it, cannot be seen as separate from the intensification of power-as-knowledge through such practices, inevitably implying concomitant changes in cultural practice, from self-making to capital accumulation strategies (1995, p. 177).

Thus, the rapid advancement of science and technology continues to have cultural-political ramifications that we are only beginning to grasp.

The discipline of psychology has not been immune to such investigation—social scientists and historians have tracked the various ways in which psychological knowledge is implicated in cultural change (e.g., Brinkmann, 2010; Cushman, 1990; Danziger, 1994; Gordo & De Vos, 2010; Lasch, 1991; Rose, 1996). Most recently, analysts have been concerned with the increasing convergence of psychological knowledge and the commodification of subjectivity itself, which, it is argued, is increasingly observable in the new cultural modes of self-making in social media (e.g., Hearn, 2008) and reality TV (e.g., De Vos, 2010) and self-work in fields like positive psychology (e.g., Binkley, 2011). There is also a wealth of empirical studies of the operation of scientific and psychological discourses in various forms of mass media— newspapers, popular science books and magazines, advice columns, television, to name a few— that are particularly relevant to the first of the empirical studies in this dissertation, and which I will review in more detail in the following chapter.

The foregoing brief and selected examples of research into cultures of science and science as culture, highlight the fact that while, with good reason, science has been accorded privileged status in modernity and appears to be independent and segregated from ordinary human affairs, it is nevertheless deeply enmeshed in—and cannot, for all its attempts, escape from—the cultural and historical contexts from which it derives its significance. Furthermore, ignorance of this embeddedness can only obfuscate attempts to understand and assess the true social impact of knowledge produced in psychological science.

2.5.8 Summary

In this section I have outlined and briefly reviewed the theoretical and empirical resources upon which the work in this dissertation draws. In doing so, I have expanded upon the specific questions to which I wish to subject the field of implicit social cognition and the IAT. The frame of enquiry I have outlined here involves, to state it crudely, making strange again what has become familiar. For a student of psychology this is no easy task, as the conceptual frame of psychology—which inevitably foregrounds certain features of reality as interesting and worthwhile, while rendering others invisible—has been both a goal of my education as well as a fundamental part of that of Enlightenment modernity. The theory and research I have cited here provide one resource through which to gain a critical distance; the other is history. It is thus to

24 the recent history of implicit social cognition and the study of prejudice in social psychology that I now turn.

2.6 Historicizing the study of race and prejudice in social psychology

2.6.1 Overview

In this section I provide a brief overview of the recent emergence of implicit social cognition as a paradigm of substantial influence within social psychology, with a specific focus on the issue of prejudice and racism. As I have already mentioned, prejudice has been crucial to the ways in which the academic and social importance of implicit social cognition has been framed. In fact, as the following review will demonstrate, the study of prejudice has been central to the historical legitimacy and self-image of the discipline of social psychology itself. The emergence and development of social psychology, implicit social cognition discourse, and implicit prejudice, as one of its main objects of study, are thus intimately intertwined. In presenting this review, I pay particular attention to both the historical context of the paradigm’s emergence, as well as the forms of rhetoric apparent within its literature. In line with the orientation toward language adopted in this dissertation, I thus attempt to give due credence to the theoretical arguments and empirical findings of the field, while keeping an eye on the form of its debates and on its framing of its own and others’ arguments.

I begin firstly by situating the implicit social cognition paradigm within the historically contingent trajectory of problematizations of race and prejudice within Western society and concurrently, in the social sciences. I trace the ways in which the psychological study of prejudice has changed both as a function of internal disciplinary developments (e.g., the development of new methods, the incorporation of new findings), as well as of broader, social and political shifts (e.g., the demise and sequelae of colonialism, the advent of civil rights in North America). In regard to the latter, the discipline of social psychology as a whole, but particularly the study of racial prejudice, has been profoundly shaped by the apparent triumph of liberal democratic values in the west, as well as globally over the last century, and many of the values embodied in social psychological prejudice research can be seen to reflect those of liberal democratic ideology (Herman, 1995). In providing such a review I hope to demonstrate that implicit social cognition, and its preferred research method, the Implicit Association Test (IAT),

25 have emerged as a particular kind of contemporary solution to issues that have plagued social psychology—as one of the frameworks within which the preoccupations and contradictions of liberal society are problematized—since its inception (cf. Billig, 1988; Stam, Radtke, & Lubek, 2000).

Part of this historical tracing requires noting three important shifts over the last century in the way in which race and prejudice have been problematized in psychology. Beginning with the era of “race science” in the early twentieth century, psychology was chiefly concerned with the exploration and confirmation of race differences, threads of which are still evident today (e.g., Rushton & Jensen, 2005). Race psychology gradually gave way to an emphasis on the notion of prejudice as a distinctly psychological, and specifically cognitive, phenomenon lying at the root of racism. This shift also entailed a concerted effort to demonstrate that prejudice resulted from “normal”, fundamental cognitive processes, thus significantly eroding the image of racism as irrational, or psychopathological. Thirdly, and most recently, social psychologists have turned their attention almost exclusively to the detection of “hidden” or unconscious prejudice. These latter shifts of focus represent important changes in the ways in which prejudice is conceived as a psychological phenomenon within liberal democracies. These points are discussed in further detail below.

2.6.2 From “race psychology” to “irrational prejudice”

2.6.2.1 Race psychology prior to World War II

Researching and understanding “prejudice” has by no means always been a concern for social psychologists. With few exceptions (see Webster, Saucier, & Harris, 2010), the turn to prejudice as an object of study only began early in the twentieth century as a result of the convergence of a series of social and political events that impinged upon the social sciences as a whole. Prior to the Second World War, psychologists researching race did so primarily with the aim of identifying and elaborating on racial differences in such things as personality, cranial size, and group behaviour (e.g., Garth, 1930), producing findings that propped up widely held assumptions about the superiority of the white race relative to the panoply of peoples encountered through the exploits of Western colonialism. Against the general intellectual background of evolutionary thought provided by Darwin’s Origin of the Species, many of psychology’s early endeavours in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries clearly reflected preoccupations that were

26 consonant with the latter stages of the European colonial project. Prominent figures such as Francis Galton argued for the existence of innate differences in intelligence between races, and, together with numerous others, including Robert Yerkes and Lewis Terman, reinforced ideas of an essential intellectual inferiority amongst blacks, Indians and “Latins” (see Teo, 2011). Following this early work came a concerted exploration among U.S. psychologists of race differences on a variety of attributes—constituting the field of “race psychology”—leading up to the 1940s.

By the 1940s, the beginnings of a major shift were becoming evident. Researchers started to focus less on highlighting racial distinctions, and more on studying the nature of bigotry and intolerance, primarily in response to sweeping social and political developments (Samelson, 1978). Through the 1920s and 1930s, the passage of new immigration laws in North America, the beginnings of racial diversification in the ranks of psychologists themselves, the Great Depression and the resultant shift to the political left, and finally the advent of fascism and National Socialism in Europe, profoundly transformed the dominant paradigm for understanding group relations in psychology (Samelson, 1978). Contemporaneously, various scathing critiques were being mounted against the scientific status of the concept of “race” in social anthropology, and as early as the 1930s the social psychologist Otto Klineberg had published similarly critical and effective analyses of race psychology (Richards, 1997). These developments, together with increasing concerns raised by applied psychologists about the psychological effects of racism, laid much of the groundwork for the move towards the study of race attitudes and prejudice in social psychology.

2.6.2.2 The post-World War II polity and prejudice

Although some social scientific writing on the notion of “prejudice” already existed at the turn of the twentieth century, the 1940s saw it gain in prominence as a central concern for the fledgling discipline of social psychology, providing both the “real-world” and moral legitimacy for the new field. In many respects, during this time, the study of prejudice took on the status of the raison d’être for social psychology. Indeed, many applied social psychology sections of textbooks of the time opened with the problem of prejudice (Samelson, 1978). Prior to the Second World War, the publication of Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1997) had already served to popularize cynical images of “the general public” as a “bewildered herd”, restricted in

27 their capacity for rational perception and thought as a consequence of their psychological limitations. Additionally, the poor state of race relations in the United States had already been regarded as a source of national embarrassment for a democratic state. Then, as the full extent and nature of Nazi atrocities was revealed following the war, the relationship between racial bigotry and democratic morale became a national priority, and psychologists became intensely concerned with studying, reducing and preventing prejudice. According to Herman (1995), “a broad and explicit consensus developed that prejudice was a fundamental source of war and a threat to democracy. Its eradication was identified with respect for the personality, peace, mental health, and with psychological expertise itself” (p. 57, italics mine). This, together with the publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s (1944) An American Dilemma—a seminal study of the contradictions of black-white relations in the context of democracy—mobilized many in the social sciences along the same lines, and saw the explicit alignment of social psychology and liberal democratic ideals. Concurrently, social psychologists were involving themselves increasingly in the “scientific management” of democratic morale and public opinion. It could be argued that social psychology’s contemporary self-image and its close identification with an enlightened humanism, has its roots in precisely these historical developments, leading at times to an automatic assumption that it is “inherently blessed with antiracist and democratic values” (Herman, 1995, p. 66).

These political developments had significant impacts on theory and methodology in social psychology itself; prejudice research constituted a major catalyst in the discipline’s coalescence around the crucial concept of attitudes during this time. Measurements of people’s ratings of different racial or ethnic groups, together with developments in the theory of attitudes, most notably that of Gordon Allport, began to monopolize the field of social psychology. The concept of attitudes has been a mainstay of social psychology since its inception (Baumeister & Finkel, 2010), but the notion of social attitudes—that is, attitudes toward social objects—only appeared decisively following World War II (Danziger, 1997). The notion of attitudes was quite significantly transformed through its uptake in psychology: what used to refer to the embodied, and therefore observable, physical instantiation of an inner reality, came to signify an internal dispositional entity that could not be seen, but only indirectly measured and inferred. In this way, the psychological concept of attitude came to reflect the underlying dualistic ontology of the discipline as a whole, in which inner psychological reality is regarded as primary and prior to its

28 external expression. As we shall see later, it is partly this dualism that underlies some intractable problems in the contemporary social psychological study of prejudice (Durrheim & Dixon, 2004).

“Prejudice” was also a term that underwent significant changes in meaning and connotation during this time. Psychoanalytic analyses of bigotry as a form of displaced aggression in the 1930s had helped to solidify the idea of prejudice as a form of irrationality, and more specifically as indicative of unsophisticated or rigid thought, or worse, low intelligence and psychological pathology (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2008). With the publication of Adorno and colleagues’ (1950) influential The Authoritarian Personality—which was conducted entirely in the United States— the tacit and stereotypical image of prejudice as expressive of some form of individual psychological flaw became widespread in both professional and everyday explanations for the phenomenon (Richards, 1997). Additionally, despite the introduction of institutional and legal regulations to combat racial injustice in the U.S., psychological experts—most notably clinicians who worked with victims of bigotry—at the time argued vigorously for the primacy of the emotional, psychological phenomenon of prejudice. Their efforts led to the widespread notion amongst psychologists (and advanced by Gordon Allport himself) that legal interventions were both superficial and temporary in comparison to the deep personal and cultural changes that needed to be wrought for the reduction of racism, a task for which social psychologists were deemed to be perfectly suited (Herman, 1995).

Concurrently, a quite different, perhaps more forgiving, conception of prejudice was beginning to take hold—in which it was viewed as the result of quite normal and fundamental psychological processes, and was therefore, in many respects, inevitable. This view has played no small part in what may be termed the naturalization of prejudice, and it is most clearly represented in Gordon Allport’s (1954/1979) The Nature of Prejudice, a landmark work which defined the field of “intergroup relations” in social psychology. Allport (1954/1979) was concerned throughout his writing with arguing for prejudice as a special case—“faulty and inflexible generalization” (p. 9)—of ordinary cognitive functioning. For example: Man has a propensity to prejudice. This propensity lies in his normal and natural tendency to form generalizations, concepts, categories, whose content represents an oversimplification of his world of experience (Allport, 1954/1979, p. 21).

What was novel, controversial and yet appealing to liberal sensibilities was his assertion of the essential similarity of the thought processes of both “prejudiced people” and “tolerant people”. Just as his contemporaries were arguing analogously in regard to group processes such as conformity (e.g., Asch, 1956) and later, obedience (Milgram, 1963), so the general thrust of Allport’s work was to express the idea that we are all prone to prejudice. Interestingly however, some commentators (e.g., Richards, 1997) have pointed out a degree of ambivalence in his work over this kind of conclusion. In other parts of his book, Allport retained the idea of a qualitative difference between tolerant and prejudiced thinking, and he also argued vigorously that tolerance required more open, fluid and rational thinking. In this way, although Allport’s work was certainly the most influential in advancing the notion that prejudice is both normal and inevitable, it also represented a liberal position statement that vilified prejudice and emphasized the importance of “tolerant” personalities for democratic life (Cherry, 2000). The tension between these contradictorily neutral and normative positions, in my view, continues to underlie contemporary prejudice research as it is expressed in the currently dominant paradigm of social cognition.

In Allport’s wake, prejudice took on a thoroughly cognitive significance. The search for “normal” thought processes underlying prejudice has been extensively elaborated in the subsequent development of prejudice and “intergroup relations” research in social psychology (see Fiske, 2005). And as the information-processing paradigm took hold over the 1950s and 1960s, the image of the computer and its operations became the principal organizing metaphor for many fields across the entire discipline of psychology (Miller, 2003). Accordingly, social psychologists began increasingly to conceptualize social phenomena as the product of the processing of “cognitions” or mental representations that took place inside individuals’ heads. The explanatory assumptions underlying much of this work are evolutionary and functional, that is, cognitive processes are understood—usually implicitly—in terms of their roles in survival and adaptation. Thus, within social cognition, categorization processes are seen as both essential to human functioning as well as being “adaptive” (Fiske, 2005; Hopkins et al., 1997). Categorization is said to serve heuristic informational purposes that allow people to make sense of an otherwise bewildering environment and respond to it appropriately. Essentially, it is argued that “lumping” people together in categories allows for more efficient information processing, without which we would be simply overwhelmed by the masses of information in our

30 surroundings (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Fiske (2005) summarizes these basic assumptions in the following way: categorization is immediate, pervasive, and integral to everyday understanding. Prejudice itself, therefore, is seen as an unavoidable, and in many respects, “adaptive” outcome of everyday cognitive functioning. Whilst the basic assumptions and concepts of social cognition continue to hold sway in the study of prejudice, the last 15 years have seen an exponential growth in interest in “hidden” cognitive processes. In cognitive terms, “hidden” denotes either introspectively unattended, or introspectively inaccessible experiences or cognitions, and it is to the development of this perspective that I now turn.

2.6.2.3 Implicit social cognition, “modern racism”, and the search for hidden prejudice

The internal and external factors that contributed to the development of the concept of implicit prejudice are relatively recent and complex. In the account that follows, the mutual interdependence of social discourse and social psychological theorizing can be seen to be especially evident. The concept of implicit prejudice, and the research methods used to expose it, appear to provide solutions to both longstanding methodological problems in social psychology, as well as the stubborn persistence of racism in liberal democratic societies. Both sets of problems, however, can be seen to rely on a specific narrative construction of individual psychology.

Payne and Gawronski’s (2010) singular account of the history of implicit social cognition traces the contemporary focus on hidden, automatic, implicit or unconscious prejudice in psychology back to two theoretical and methodological research areas in psychology: dual process models of attention and short-term memory (e.g., Devine, 1989; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995) and implicit memory (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1989, 1995). The former approach distinguished between automatic and controlled cognitive processes, with a particular focus on the manner in which well-learned attitudes could be automatically activated through sequential priming tasks. The key assertion here is that attitude activation is inescapable. In contrast, the latter approach added a far more mentalistic inflection to findings in implicit memory research that demonstrated that past experience could influence later performance, despite the absence of conscious memory of the past experience. In fact, while Fazio and colleagues (Fazio et al., 1995) seldom use the words “conscious” or “unconscious”, these terms are sprinkled liberally

31 throughout Greenwald and Banaji’s (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995) seminal paper. Transposed onto the concept of prejudice, this schema then distinguishes explicit from implicit prejudice, a formulation which maps neatly onto broader societal and social scientific discourse about the gradual disappearance of old-fashioned, “Jim Crow” racism and its displacement by “new” or modern racism.

Importantly, the methodological innovations developed in both approaches appeared to address a nagging issue in social psychological research—the recalcitrance and unreliability of the research subject. Indeed, the imperative to outwit, within limits, research subjects’ tendencies to guess at the purpose of the research they took part in, or to deny, fudge or hide socially undesirable attitudes or traits is repeated throughout the social psychological literature (see Stam et al., 2000). Implicit social cognition offered the promise of a “bona fide pipeline”(Fazio et al., 1995) into people’s true feelings and attitudes by—in effect—bypassing altogether people’s attempts at making sense of the experimental encounter as a social situation.

More generally, and with broader implications than those for psychological methodology, the notion of implicit prejudice depends on the assumption that previous conceptualizations of racism and prejudice in liberal democracies no longer apply. The standard, now almost canonical, rationale for a new conception of racism or prejudice is that the de jure institutionalization of egalitarianism into law and social policy is all but complete; but that this has not eradicated the de facto psychological propensity for prejudice, which has now simply been driven underground and finds expression in subtle, sometimes contorted ways (Banaji, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2004; Blanton & Jaccard, 2008; Blatz & Ross, 2009; Bobo, 2001; Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004; Durrheim & Dixon, 2004; Greenwald & Krieger, 2006; Kang, 2010; Kleiner, 1998; O'Brien et al., 2010; Plant et al., 2009; Quillian, 2008). The following statement by Dovidio and Gaertner (2008, p. 49) exemplifies this line of reasoning: Like a virus that has mutated, contemporary racism has evolved in a way that produces behaviors that are not directly prohibited by current laws but still contribute to the persistence of racial disparities in essential qualities of life. Even well-meaning Whites who genuinely endorse egalitarian values may discriminate against Blacks and other minorities unintentionally… Whereas blatant expressions of prejudice, such as hate crimes, are readily identified and inhibited by social sanctions, aversive racism is likely to persist unchallenged over time.

Taking this as a starting point, researchers have arrived at a number of similar, though not identical conclusions about the new forms of prejudice. Traditional, blatant, dominative, hateful, explicit, and conscious prejudice is contrasted with modern, symbolic, aversive, benevolent, implicit, and unconscious prejudice. While the former set of descriptors of prejudice necessarily include some or all of 1) the conscious endorsement of negative beliefs and stereotypes; 2) racial antipathy; and 3) discriminatory behavior, the latter typically do not. There are roughly four different theoretical positions represented by these latter terms. Very briefly, proponents of modern/symbolic racism argue that it is a form of prejudice expressed subtly in the opposition to such things as reparative racial social policy (e.g., affirmative action) (Blatz & Ross, 2009). Kinder (1986, p. 154) defines it as a “conjunction of racial prejudice and traditional American values” such as self-reliance, the work ethic, and self-discipline. Thus it could entail, for example, opposition to blacks based on the idea that they are receiving an unfair advantage. Its proponents claim, then, that this is a form of racism that allows people to be covertly prejudiced while simultaneously practicing equality. Similarly, aversive racism refers to a form of unconscious prejudice in which (typically) liberal individuals believe strongly that they are not prejudiced, and generally behave as such, unless they find themselves in certain situations where discriminatory behavior appears to be opportune (Durrheim & Dixon, 2004). Rather than open hostility then, aversive racism reflects discomfort, disgust or even fear of blacks, as well as aversion to any accusation of racism (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004). In a related way, benevolent prejudice extends the notion that antipathy is not a necessary condition for prejudice. Instead, its proponents show that positive feelings towards, and stereotypes about, blacks or women, mask a conditional approval that express a kind of paternalistic prejudice (Ramasubramanian & Oliver, 2007; Rudman, 2005). Finally, implicit prejudice refers to the presence of negative stereotypes that are “introspectively inaccessible” (Banaji & Greenwald, 1994; Payne & Gawronski, 2010) as well as being “automatic and overlearned” (Rudman, Ashmore, & Gary, 2001). It shares with the notion of aversive racism the idea that overt egalitarianism—particularly on the part of white liberals—is not merely a tactical self-presentational move to avoid public censure, but rather, that it represents either the active repression or lack of awareness of racist sentiments.

While lively debate continues over the appropriate meaning and use of the terms conscious and unconscious in referring to these constructs, and whether such indirect forms of prejudice in fact constitute prejudice as such (see, for example, Arkes & Tetlock, 2004; Banaji et al., 2004;

Blanton & Jaccard, 2008; Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Durrheim & Dixon, 2004; Kang, 2010; Payne & Gawronski, 2010), the majority consensus is clear, and the impact of this work has had far- reaching consequences for the study of prejudice as well as other topics in the entire discipline. Across the board, there is now a widespread interest in indirect measures and automatic/implicit processes, whether these pertain to self-esteem (e.g., Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Karpinski, 2004), suicidality (Nock et al., 2010), brand preference and consumer attitudes (Friese et al., 2006; Maison, Greenwald, & Bruin, 2004), political ideology (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009), voting behavior (Friese, Bluemke, & Wänke, 2007), and prejudice of all kinds.

3 Summary

In this introductory section I have introduced an analytical framework that treats the discipline of psychology, and the psychological knowledge it produces, as a specific form of social and cultural activity. In line with the philosophical and anthropological treatment of the sciences, I have attempted to contextualize and situate psychology as both a special, and ordinary, set of social and historical practices: special in the sense that it constitutes, along with the sciences in general, a sometimes spectacularly successful attempt to embody some of the central tenets and values of Enlightenment modernity, to reflect critically on our founding assumptions; and ordinary in the sense that it constitutes—despite its relative epistemological sequestration and authority in the modern scientific context—a set of social practices like any other, subject to unquestioned cultural and ideological assumptions, partiality, interestedness, and the local/global dynamics of power and capital. In this contextualization I have also attempted to show that despite intense concern over its social value and impact, psychology, together with other sciences, mistakenly underestimates the public’s reflexive negotiation of scientific (psychological) knowledge, with social, cultural and political effects and consequences that are hard to predict in any simplistically causal way. From the vantage point of critical re-evaluations of late modernity, public skepticism of psychology may reflect far more than irrationality and stubborn traditionalism. As the various transformations of information technology and mass media, as well as economic imperatives for “knowledge translation” gradually close the gap between institutionalized science and the public, it is these negotiations, tensions and critical skepticisms that this dissertation explores with specific reference to the social psychology of prejudice.

I have also discussed more explicitly the theoretical/philosophical and empirical sources of my analytical approach, highlighting the importance of discourse and discursive practices as conceptual and analytical “tools” for examining empirically the performative and constitutive effects of the knowledge and practices of psychology, as well as their instantiation in everyday public discussion.

Finally, I have provided a brief historical overview of the study of race and prejudice in psychology in order to demonstrate the central place that these topics have historically occupied in the very identity and legitimacy of social psychology. My aim in doing so has been to highlight the interdependence of disciplinary transformations in theories, concepts and methods for studying race and prejudice, and broader developments in social policy and political necessity, most notably in the United States. In this perspective, we can view the implicit social cognition approach, as well as the concept of implicit prejudice, as asking particular ontological, ethical and political questions of certain sectors of the public, implying certain kinds of answers. It is the systematic evaluation of these questions and answers that constitute, in addition to those summarized above, the central purposes of this dissertation.

Having established the importance of viewing psychology and society as reflexively interdependent, how can such phenomena be studied? What are the sites of interaction, consumption and negotiation between the expert knowledges of implicit social cognition and those of the “public”? One relatively naturalistic setting—for the purposes of this dissertation— would be people’s multiple sites of engagement with such knowledge as it is disseminated in the mass media. Science journalism has always served as one of the primary media through which scientific findings are translated and represented to a wider, non-expert audience (Rensberger, 2009). While dedicated popular science publications may indeed target scientists and amateurs alike, research findings in biomedicine, neuroscience and psychology now frequently find their place on the front pages or in regular columns of mainstream daily newspapers, and dedicated popular science publications have proliferated in recent years. With the advent of social media, and accompanying transformations in journalism which allow readers to comment on and engage with journalistic material, there are now unprecedented opportunities to examine what has become known as “popular science”, or “public science” (see, for example, Cassidy, 2006; Davies, 2009; Gauchat, 2012)—that is, the ways in which people interact with and negotiate scientific knowledge in public debate, for example in newspapers, or discussion forums or reader

35 comments sections of news websites. Psychological science, and implicit social cognition of prejudice in particular has enjoyed considerable media attention over the last decade, and the public record now contains hundreds of discussions, comments and reactions to research findings in the field. The first empirical study—details of which are reported in the following section— explores this material with the aim of characterizing the nature of public discourse about prejudice, the self, and the social world, that ensues upon encountering the ontological and ethical claims and techniques of implicit social cognition.

Chapter 2 Study 1: Implicit prejudice, self and society in the New York Times

1 Overview

In this section I present the findings of a study that examined psychological discourses of prejudice and the self in public debate on the IAT and the notion of implicit prejudice. Through a discursive and thematic analysis of a large archive of public discussion of psychological science in the New York Times, the study addresses the following questions:

• How is the IAT, and “implicit prejudice”—as an explicitly psychological construct— negotiated and applied in public debate on prejudice and racism?

• How are the self and ethical agency constituted in public discourse about implicit prejudice? How are people positioned in relation to it?

By analyzing this naturalistic corpus of open public debate, I address a central objective of this dissertation: to characterize the ways in which the public interprets the idea of implicit prejudice and the IAT in relation to key social and political concerns, and thus to derive some basis upon which to evaluate the IAT and its research paradigm as tools in anti-racist efforts. The analysis of discourse is therefore followed by a brief discussion along these lines, followed by the identification of questions for further study, which I take up subsequently in Study 2 of this dissertation.

2 Rationale 2.1 Prejudice in public discussion

The production and popularization of knowledge about prejudice in social psychology has unintended, but nevertheless significant consequences for the ways in which the public and other non-experts deliberate upon it as a personal, social and political problem. However, very few studies have examined specifically how social psychological research and theory are appropriated and function in this way in public discourse.

36 37

Additionally, discursive studies of racism and prejudice over the last few decades have focused predominantly on the rhetorical forms through which racist or prejudiced positions are constituted in everyday language. Thus, studies in this vein have shown how, for example, accounts of cultural difference (e.g., Wetherell & Potter, 1993), constructions of space and place (e.g., Durrheim & Dixon, 2010) and differential attributions of “reasonableness” to social groups (e.g., Billig et al., 1988), function to support racist ideologies in various contexts. Analysts such as Billig (1999) have argued that the “dilemmatic” nature of modern ideologies means that prejudiced accounts must be formulated in rational terms, in order for speakers to avoid being positioned as irrational and prejudiced. Of special relevance to the present study is that such research has suggested that everyday accounts of prejudice often draw explicitly from theory in social psychology as a rational, authoritative resource for both explaining, and in some cases, defending against charges of racism (e.g., Billig, 1988; Figgou & Condor, 2006; Hopkins, Reicher, & Levine, 1997; Lea, 1996). The relatively recent introduction of the concepts and techniques of implicit social cognition into public discourse on prejudice therefore demands urgent analytic attention. How might these ostensibly new concepts be drawn upon in lay deliberations on racism? And what relevance might this have for the ways that prejudice is tackled as a social problem in both private and public spheres?

More broadly, the present study has a bearing on the issue of public understanding of science and knowledge mobilization. Improving public trust and participation in science is of increasing interest to governments and policy makers, as expressed in recent policy statements by Canadian federal funding agencies (see for example, the SSHRC policy on open access, Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, 2012) which are reflective of a larger movement in which public consultation and deliberation are regarded as essential to the process of democratizing and applying scientific research to public policy (see, for example, Davies, 2009; Gauchat, 2012; Straus, Tetroe, & Graham, 2009). Such participation is increasingly being seen as essential for the inculcation of “scientific citizenship” (Bickerstaff, Lorenzoni, Jones, & Pidgeon, 2010). However, there is a scarcity of research in psychology about how this might look in practice, for as we have seen, this is seldom a straightforward matter of education or dissemination of science, but rather involves the reflexive re-shaping of selves in relation to knowledge, with its accompanying ethical implications. More specifically, the public’s willingness to engage with science is “contingent upon the social relationships and identities which people feel to be

38 affected by scientific knowledge, which never comes free of social interests or implications” (Wynne, 1992, p. 281).

Furthermore, studies of public participation in science have demonstrated that the boundaries separating “layperson” from “expert” are becoming increasingly difficult to draw (e.g., Kerr, Cunningham-Burley, & Tutton, 2007). Such ambiguities are especially evident in the more informal, often anonymous spaces of online science participation, and their potential for understanding public engagement with science has only recently been acknowledged (Kouper, 2010; Laslo, Baram-Tsabari, & Lewenstein, 2011). As Wynne (1992) and others have argued, laypeople are capable of sophisticated, though informal, reflection on their relationship to scientific experts, as well as on the epistemological status of their own knowledge in relation to science. This study constitutes just such an examination of informal public reflection on the Implicit Association Test.

2.2 The IAT and public participation

Implicit social cognition, and the Implicit Association Test, in particular, have benefited from steadily increasing coverage in online newspapers and science blogs around the world, but especially in North America. Approximate publication counts over the last 14 years are suggestive of its growth in both academic and public visibility. Table 1 below shows rough estimates for works published in scholarly journals or books (globally) and newspapers (in North America) containing the key words “implicit association test”, based on citations databases and Google Scholar searches. These estimates suggest rapid growth in both research activity and popular coverage of the IAT.

As research activity has increased, the IAT has been featured on TV programs (e.g., NBC Dateline), radio discussions (e.g., NPR) and in numerous print and online publications. However, it is the online availability of the IAT on its Project Implicit demonstration website (implicit.harvard.edu) that has arguably contributed most significantly to its public visibility and popularity. Many websites of academic organizations, NGOs, popular psychology publications and general interest and science blogs now link directly to the IAT website. The site allows public visitors to take the test in much the same form as it is administered in formal laboratory research, differing only in its disclosure of individual test “results” to test-takers.

Table 1: Academic works and newspaper articles on the IAT between 1998 and 2012 Years Academic works Online newspaper articles (North America) 1998-2000 64 7 2001-2002 208 7 2003-2004 519 8 2005-2006 847 22 2007-2008 1500 52 2009-2010 1880 34 2011-2012 (Oct) 2140 22 Total 7158 130

Importantly, when IAT research is reported in mainstream news websites such as CNN.com and the New York Times, readers are—almost without exception—invited to take the test themselves. Thus, scientists and journalists are able not only to describe and explain IAT research and its significance, but they can also demonstrate experientially the phenomena to which they refer. Its ease of administration and brevity thus place it in an enviably accessible position. In being so publically available, the IAT is unlike most other psychometric instruments in psychology, which are treated as confidential, and where public exposure is typically seen as damaging to the integrity of psychological tests (e.g., BPS Psychological Testing Centre, 2008). The IAT is especially unusual in giving online test-takers individual test results that indicate the extent of their implicit bias for various social groups (see Figure 1 below) (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002)3.

For these reasons, the IAT website offers the public the almost unprecedented opportunity for close interaction with the tools of psychological science. Public responses to it can therefore provide important insights into the relationship between psychological science and the public. As the notion of implicit or unconscious prejudice vies for its place in our cultural common sense, it is becoming increasingly important to understand exactly how it is likely to impact on the way that prejudice is understood and acted upon in the public domain.

3 The administration of individual test results to the general public, using a psychometric instrument designed primarily for research purposes, has itself generated a great deal of controversy within the discipline (see, for example, Blanton & Jaccard, 2006, 2008; Nosek & Sriram, 2007).

Figure 1: Screenshot of individual test result from IAT demonstration website 3 Methods 3.1 The New York Times

Content and coverage of the IAT in the New York Times was chosen as a focus for this study, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the broadsheet has carried a considerable number of articles specifically about or referencing the IAT and implicit prejudice, in feature articles, science sections, and op-ed columns. The online versions of these articles link to, and invite their readers to take the IAT, and offer their opinions and comment on both the test and the findings reported. These reader comments and discussions, which often comprise a rich and lively debate amongst readers, constitute a large, accessible, and particularly valuable archive of public deliberations on the IAT and psychological science. Additionally, the New York Times is a national newspaper of record, has the third largest circulation in the U.S. behind USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, and is most often the subject of media content analysis because of its acknowledged considerable influence on public opinion and social policy making (cf. Freeman, 2010; Handley, 2009; Ismail & Mishra, 2009; New York Times Company, n.d.). Furthermore, the science reporting in the New York Times is accorded a high status in the world of science journalism (Clark & Illman, 2006), and is also considered to be especially powerful in influencing public scientific knowledge and opinion (cf. Marshall, 1998). In this respect, papers such as the New

York Times tend to “set the agenda” for the news hole4, and their selection of stories is watched closely and imitated across the world of news production, especially in the U.S. Finally, it is the third most visited online dedicated news service after BBC Online (first) and CNN.com (second), in a top 100 dominated by search engines, social networking and pornography websites (Alexa Internet Analytics, n.d.).

3.1.1 Reader demographics

In selecting the New York Times, no claims are being made as to the demographic representativeness of texts published therein. While there might be a range of positions on implicit prejudice not covered in this publication, the aim of the present study is not to comprehensively survey such diversity, nor to determine the prevalence of different positions. Rather, the narrower scope is suited to a more fine-grained, qualitative analysis of how—that is, the specific ways in which—knowledge about implicit prejudice is constituted, engaged with, and achieves its effects in public discourse.

With this in mind, I present some of the broad demographic contours of the publication’s readership in order to contextualize and frame the possible social and economic positions from which many readers responded to the IAT and implicit prejudice. The NYTimes.com website (New York Times, 2009) indicates that its readership is 51.1% male and 48.9% female, they have a median age of 47 years, and a median household income of $75 265 (the U.S. median income is $49 777). More than 80% of readers have a college degree (27% of U.S. adults have a college degree), while 22.6% have a graduate degree (7.9% of U.S. adults). The most represented occupations are professional/managerial (27.7%), technical (6.7%) and educational (6.6%). Figures for the print edition indicate a readership with a lower median income, and a smaller percentage with higher education. The summary contains no information about the geographical locations of its readers, although a number of commenters voluntarily disclose this information in their comments. Further information about the kinds of people who are more likely to interact with the content on NYTimes.com comes from a study by Chung (2008). Her research found that number of years online, degree of civic involvement, and political engagement were strong

4 “News hole” is a journalistic term referring to the amount of daily space available for news in a newspaper. This is usually calculated as the space available for news after paid advertising (Solomon, 2009).

42 predictors of interaction with discussion forums and letters to the editor on online newspaper websites.

Taken together, this information suggests that readers of NYTimes.com who are also more likely to participate in online discussion and interaction might be wealthier, more highly educated, Internet-savvy, and more socially and politically engaged in relation to the rest of the U.S. population. This is, of course, generally consistent with the publication’s “influential” standing.

3.1.2 Selection of texts

As the amount of material covering the IAT in the New York Times is large, and only some of it is directly relevant to the purposes of this study, I applied the following criteria in a preliminary selection of the most pertinent data:

• The material must be in the form of an article, or a piece from a regular (science) column or weblog;

• Such articles/pieces must have associated reader comments;

• They must have been published between 1998 (the year of the IAT’s publication) and 2010.

Applying these criteria, the corpus of texts selected for study comprised 7 articles/pieces with reader comments published between 2008 and 2010, the details of which are presented in Table 2 below. The full text of the articles (without comments) can be found in Appendix 1.

As is evident in the table below, most of the material selected for analysis was published in 2008 or later. This was the case for two reasons. First, the prevalence of online discussions in response to newspaper articles appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon, and it was difficult to find articles on the IAT prior to 2008 to which there was a significant online public response. Second, the richest news coverage of the IAT—and the impassioned public debate that it spurred— centred on the presidential elections of November 2008, in which the state of race relations in the United States was brought to the forefront of public consciousness by the (possible) election of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama. Political commentators wondered whether, in a repeat of the “Bradley effect”, Obama’s firm lead in pre-election polls would ultimately not be

43 reflected in the final ballot (cf. Altman, 2008; Greenwald, Smith, Sriram, Bar-Anan, & Nosek, 2009). The IAT appeared to provide intriguing possibilities in this context, because of claims that since more than 75% of Americans harbored unconscious racial prejudice, there might be some doubt about whether Obama would be elected. Once he had been elected, however, subsequent articles called into question the “real world” validity of the concept of implicit prejudice in psychology. Many of these pieces were published in print and online; where the latter was the case, a great deal of public debate was generated (see Table 2 below indicating numbers of reader comments).

Table 2: New York Times articles and comments selected for analysis, with word counts

Date published Article title Type Comments Words

29/10/2008 What? Me biased? Op-Ed 213 26842

07/11/2008 Where have all the bigots gone? Science 104 12814

17/11/2008 A shocking test of bias Science 72 1913

18/11/2008 Further reading on unconscious bias Science 9 14029

19/11/2008 How do you measure bias? Science 19 2263

21/02/2009 A nation of cowards Op-Ed 340 61441

01/06/2010 The visible hand Science 36 3952

Totals 793 123254

3.1.3 Features of the journalistic articles

In general, the IAT appeared in two kinds of article, the op-ed and the science column (see Table 2 above), and the journalistic writing in each was generally consistent with these respective genres. In both cases, it is clear that they were targeted for the most part at a non-specialist, general audience. There were however, significant differences between them: in the op-eds, the IAT and its findings were employed in a clear polemic about current affairs, whilst in the science columns, the language was less impassioned and an attempt was made to present and critically discuss the IAT and implicit prejudice themselves.

Thematically, the op-ed pieces were chiefly concerned with the state of race relations and the assertion of widespread prejudice in the U.S. In this respect they emphasized the contradictions

44 between the values of equality and fairness in U.S. society and evidence of widespread racial bias as revealed by the IAT, echoing themes that extend back to Myrdal and Bok’s (1944) diagnosis of U.S. race relations. There were distinctly psychological inflections to these pieces, regarding human brains, human cognition, and the need for an honest and brave national dialogue on race. As can be seen in Table 2 above, the op-ed pieces used emotive and provocative headlines to frame calls to learn from “the facts” of unconscious racial prejudice (as revealed by the IAT), casting this as crucial to “having an adult conversation” about prejudice in the U.S. In this respect IAT science was presented as uncontroversial and self-evidently true, requiring no justification. Despite this representation, the op-eds anticipated reader skepticism by referring and linking people to the Project Implicit website where “you can test for your own unconscious biases”.

By contrast, the science articles introduced dissent and questioned the usefulness of IAT findings in relation to the results of the presidential election, referring to critiques from within psychology. They explicitly questioned the status of IAT science as a form of knowledge, and like the op-eds, provided links to the Project Implicit website. One notably different science piece linked readers to academic journal articles and invited them to “make up their own minds”. In doing so, this piece assumed a somewhat greater level of scientific literacy on the part of its readers.

Taken together, the selected texts represent a varied but highly pertinent set of perspectives and themes in relation to the IAT.

3.2 Analytical approach

All of the material identified and selected above was first entered into the qualitative analysis software nVivo 8. Thereafter, utilizing the coding, collation and modeling facilities of the software, the texts were analyzed according to two qualitative, interpretive procedures.

First, the entire corpus of texts was read in order to derive the overarching themes, contexts and narratives within and through which implicit social cognition research was invoked. This allowed a “mapping” of the social contexts and broad concerns to which implicit prejudice was applied. The generality and relative importance of themes was determined through attention to not only the extent of their recurrence across journalistic articles and reader discussions, but also

45 to the intensity and quality of discussion provoked “around” them, what is sometimes referred to as a “nodal point” of discourse (cf. Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002). This first step thus approximated the procedures of a hermeneutic, qualitative thematic analysis, in which basic patterns of meaning and sense-making are identified and arranged in both a data-driven and theoretically coherent manner (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006; Ricoeur, 1981). In the course of this thematic reading, five overarching coding categories were identified, namely, responses to/characterizations of psychology and the IAT, explanations/characterizations of prejudice/racism, subject positioning, warranting of claims, and form/genre of comment. These categories were comprised of 35 sub-codes, a full list of which can be found in Appendix 2. The purpose of this initial reading was also to whittle down the corpus of texts and select a data set: only those reader comments that referenced (implicit) psychological science or that were direct responses to taking the Implicit Association Test, were selected. Thus, comments that were irrelevant or only addressed, for example, the presidential election, or race in general, were excluded. Roughly 60% (~475 out of 793) of reader comments, or parts of comments, met these criteria and were selected for further coding and analysis. Thereafter, two research assistants coded the remaining texts into one or more of the abovementioned categories/sub-codes. To ensure consistency in the interpretation of these categories and codes, I re-coded samples of each in the texts along the way. All discrepancies in coding were resolved through team discussions.

Subsequently, a second, more fine-grained analysis was undertaken according to principles of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1993; Parker, 1992). For the purposes of this study, the coded texts were scanned specifically for reader comments that contained responses to and characterizations of the IAT and psychological science, discussion of the meaning of implicit prejudice, and explicit and implicit self-positioning. Attention was paid to those that were particularly rhetorically effective. Taking Parker (1992) and Fairclough (1993) as guides, I examined these texts to tease apart their ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings. According to Fairclough (1993), the domains of these meanings “are respectively, the representation and signification of the world and experience, the constitution (establishment, reproduction, negotiation) of identities of participants (i.e. subject positioning) and social and personal relationships between them, and the distribution of given versus new and foregrounded versus backgrounded information” (p. 136). In particular, I focused on the identification of subject positions within the texts (for example, “outraged victim of prejudice”, “skeptically self-

46 aware”, or “dispassionate psychological expert”) and the ways that these figured in the warranting of readers’ claims. These analytical features cannot be fully appreciated in isolation, and the analysis I present here, therefore, is integrative of these elements. For example, while a reader’s comment may be simply a descriptive account of a past experience of prejudice, this description may entail a statement or claim that is warranted in some way, and which positions the reader as a certain kind of subject, with particular rights to speak and make certain claims. In my analysis, I attempt to demonstrate how these work together to achieve certain rhetorical effects. Furthermore, I have not selected for analysis all possible themes/discourses and subject positions in these texts (which would be numerous and beyond the scope of this study), but have focused specifically on those that are relevant to my research questions, namely, those in which versions of implicit social psychology, implicit prejudice, and the IAT are constructed or “depicted” in some way, and the subject positions implicated in these constructions. Additionally, since I am interested in the self- and ethical implications of implicit prejudice discourse, I concentrated specifically on subject positions invoked by readers for themselves (as opposed to the positioning of others in their comments). These are summarized in Table 3. Percentages shown are of the 475 comments selected for analysis, and serve as rough approximations of their “prevalence” in the text. Note that not all of these are explicitly analyzed below, but that their identification figured in the analysis of discourse I present here.

Although I provide summary numerical data in this table, these at best can give only an impressionistic sense of the importance of these themes. Moreover, my aim in this study is not to make claims about the frequency, prevalence, or distribution of particular positions or discourses, but rather to elucidate the qualities of such discursive practices and how they function in people’s accounts in the first instance. In terms of my specific research questions, I am concerned more with what possible discourses might exist, how these are configured, and how these shape debate about prejudice, than with making distributional claims about particular discourses of implicit prejudice. As Wood and Kroger (Wood & Kroger, 2000) argue extensively, the significance of patterns identified in discourse analysis is judged in terms of how they support and help to make sense of other important patterns identified in an analysis, and of the analysis as a whole. Thus, themes are established as significant, not statistically, but in terms of their interpretative importance. For example, a discourse may be identified and analyzed even though it does not appear very frequently in the texts, and furthermore, that silences or omissions

47 across peoples’ accounts may themselves indicate a significant interpretive feature (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002).

Table 3: Summary of relevant themes, discourses and subject positions

% of data set Description coded* Themes/discourses Credibility of IAT Discussion of integrity and worth of IAT and 48.5% science psychological science Skepticism Mistrust, doubt or suspicion of IAT 38.6%** Trust Acceptance, belief, confidence in IAT 35.3%** Bias as negative Assumption or portrayal of bias as wrong or undesirable 30.5% American prejudice Discussion of prejudice in American terms (see below) 22.1% Justifications of “Subtle” rationalizations of prejudice on basis of culture, 8.5% prejudice fairness etc.

Subject positions Skeptic Explicit or implicit self-positioning as doubtful, critical, 21.5% impartial, and/or shrewd Believer Explicit or implicit self-positioning as trustful, guilty, 12.3% and/or self-reflexive Inept scientist Positioning of psychological scientists as marginal 5.1% and/or biased

* Refers to proportion of text coded, rather than percentage of comments.

** These refer to percentages of comments pertaining to Credibility, sub-coded as either ‘skeptical’ or ‘trustful’, and do not sum to 100% since not all text coded under Credibility could be sub-coded in these categories.

4 Analysis 4.1 Overview

I begin the analytical discussion by describing briefly the overall themes and features of the entire corpus of texts. My aim in doing so is to sketch broadly the ways in which the boundaries of the public debate were drawn, and the terms within which public discussion took place. I then turn to a detailed analysis of the discourses, subject positions and their discursive effects identified in reader comments and response to implicit prejudice and the IAT.

4.2 Overall themes and features of the corpus

A notable and defining feature of the selected texts was that, following the language of the IAT, the psychology of race relations was talked about in terms of “bias”, rather than prejudice or racism. Additionally, almost without exception, the attribution of bias was constructed as negative. Thus, in all but a handful of reader comments about bias, discussion of the IAT and implicit prejudice proceeded on the tacit assumption that being unbiased or impartial was unquestionably desirable, and being biased was undeniably wrong. “Biases” were thus confessed, avoided, explained, or imputed to others. The tacit “bias against bias” was also evident in the kinds of language that appeared in reader responses, much of which tended to be constructed in rational, considered terms. As will hopefully become evident in what follows, this was an important—though generally unspoken—imperative that structured readers’ responses in various ways. Specific features of these kinds of response are therefore discussed in greater detail in the analysis below.

Furthermore, the importance of the IAT was framed in relation to the distinctly American context of prejudice. Thus, the terms of the debate tended to be markedly polarized, and prejudice was cast as a “national” problem, bounded by the dichotomous juxtapositions of “black” and “white”, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. Additionally, in spite of the parochial nature of this American schema of race relations, the ascription of scientific authority to the IAT and its terms signified a universal relevance and applicability. Apart from a few instances, this binary framing of prejudice was accepted mostly unquestioningly in reader comments. It is interesting to note here that, in this sense, the structure and design of the IAT as a psychometric task both mirrored, and reproduced the dichotomous discourse of race relations in the U.S. Talk about the IAT and the notion of bias thus fit quite neatly within this schema, resulting in a dominant frame for making sense of prejudice in terms of a partiality or inclination towards one group over another.

An additional remarkable feature of the texts, and of reader comments in particular, was the relative frequency of rhetorical justifications of prejudice, formulations of fairness, equality, and cultural incompatibility commonly observed in race talk in liberal societies. Many of these could be seen to be reinforcing of racist ideologies, in particular those identified as “modern” or “subtle” (Sears & Henry, 2005). Moreover, evolutionary and social psychological theory and

49 discourse were commonly employed in such justifications for prejudice, a finding which is consonant with previous discursive studies of racism. As mentioned above, both of these discursive features and dynamics of race talk have been closely examined in the literature (e.g., Billig, 1991; Condor, 2006; Wetherell, 2003), and were therefore not specifically included in the present analysis.

In summary then, the overall conditions of reader debate were framed by the terms imposed by both the social and scientific context. Thus, discussion primarily employed the language of “bias” as opposed to prejudice or racism, in terms essentially congruent with the binary framing of race issues in both the U.S. and the IAT. Second, talk of the IAT and prejudice occasioned accounts that reproduced previously documented rhetorical forms of justification for prejudice.

4.3 Analysis of reader comments and discussion

4.3.1 Synopsis

The primary “nodal point” around which much reader discussion revolved was that of the credibility of IAT science. Reader responses reflected tensions over this credibility, corresponding with existing ambiguities in the public image of psychology, confusions over the imputation of moral/ethical responsibility for prejudice, and finally, uncertainties about the modern social valuation of impartiality. In general, I argue that public discussion of the IAT and implicit prejudice constituted a moral space within which the idealization of two specific modes of psychological subjectivity—impartiality (non-bias), and self-scrutiny (self-knowledge)—was unquestioned. Readers were thus afforded positions within this space as essentially unbiased through recourse to two subject positions: (i) the skeptic and (ii) the believer. “Skeptical” positions were constituted through language that criticized psychological science and mimicked the discourses of secular rationality and scientific impartiality, while “believing” subjectivities drew on culturally pervasive confessional discourses to constitute a self-scrutinizing, conscientious and ultimately blame-free position in relation to unconscious prejudice. Finally, my analysis demonstrates the ways in which laypeople engage reflexively and with some degree of sophistication in relation to psychological knowledge, in contrast to deficit models generally assumed in the psychological literature.

In what follows, I develop my analysis of reader responses through a specific focus on the tensions between skepticism and trust, addressing the related themes of culpability and impartiality along the way. In doing so I will provide illustrative and exemplary excerpts of reader comments. Excerpts are identified by the specific New York Times article to which they responded, as well as a number indicating their order of appearance in this manuscript. A key to the abbreviations used for article titles can be found in Appendix 3. Where readers identified themselves, their names are also included with their excerpts.

4.3.2 Credibility: IAT skepticism

Reader responses that were skeptical of IAT science questioned or repudiated it on the grounds of its lack of objectivity, trustworthiness, real-life relevance, and/or resonance with “personal experience”. Where the IAT and its findings were criticized or rejected, they were commonly characterized as representative of “bad science”. These criticisms reiterated those that have frequently been leveled at the discipline of psychology as a whole (Lilienfeld, 2012), and focused on two common dissatisfactions with psychological science. First, they discredited IAT research as superficial, mechanistic, and disconnected from “real life”; and second, as politically motivated or biased. Accordingly, IAT researchers were positioned within these ways of speaking as misguided and irrational, or overly invested and dogmatic, while readers claimed objectivity and discernment in their skepticism. In this way, these skeptical accounts enacted an inversion of the presumed unequal distribution of powers of rational and critical thinking among scientists and laypeople, assumed in most deficit models of public understanding of science (Sturgis & Allum, 2004).

4.3.2.1 Marginality and real-life irrelevance

In this kind of critical response, the phenomena that psychologists were said to be studying— such things as reaction times, split-second decisions and ultimately, unconscious bias—were constructed as “marginal” and irrelevant through juxtapositions with “actual” or “obvious” instances of racism. In these accounts, the abstractions of scientific data were set contrastively against the concreteness of “real life”, and it was implied that society was far more complex, and racism more tangible, than seemed to be indicated by the IAT and the concept of implicit prejudice. For example:

It’s time scientists started studying explicit bias instead of playing guessing games with “hidden” bias. Our prisons are full of hate groups of all kinds—a ready resource if properly approached (Marcella, FRB-1).

To me the question of whether [unconscious] racism exists is almost irrelevant when 1 in 15 black adults and 1 in 9 black men between 20 and 34 is in jail (The overall US rate is 1 in 100 adults) (Nick, NOC-1).

More seriously: I am very suspicious of claims (and tests) for unconscious bias and its place in discussions about race. Most serious prejudice shows up in tangible social statistics – for example, school dropout rates, incarceration rates, median family wealth. These are matters for public policy. Unconscious bias is not (Mark S., STB-1).

It’s a shame so much time is spent pulling apart … such tiny bits of data… There are many, many examples of actual bias but for some reason there is a shift of interest toward the marginal case where implicit attitudes may—repeat may—affect things… (Jonathan, FRB-2).

People don’t usually make decisions based on split-second reactions. I get the feeling that certain researchers really really want to prove racism is still rampant, and that everyone is racist even if they don’t know it… (Stephan, WBG-1).

Each of these accounts effectively trivialized implicit prejudice and IAT research by extreme comparative formulations of prejudice and racism. These formulations of extreme difference are particularly effective in their contrasting of relevant and irrelevant forms of racism. Thus, implicit bias or unconscious racism are “hidden” or guessed at, as opposed to “explicit” and “obvious”; they are “irrelevant”, “marginal” and trivial, as opposed to “serious” and “tangible”.

Not only is IAT science belittled in such accounts, but there are implicit images of psychological scientists being referenced here as well. The extracts above evoke familiar stereotypes of scientists as eccentrics, hopelessly out of touch with their social worlds (cf. Losh, 2010; McAdam, 1990). IAT scientists are said to be “playing guessing games”, or “pulling apart tiny bits of data”, implying a frivolous or fastidious, and ultimately misdirected and wasteful use of time and resources. In the second to last extract (Jonathan, FRB-2), it is implied in the phrase “for some reason there is a shift of interest…” that IAT scientists have no good reasons for pursuing implicit prejudice, which casts their actions as groundless or inexplicable. This kind of positioning of IAT scientists as unreasonable is explored further below.

An additional facet of this construction of the marginal nature of IAT science was expressed in doubts and misgivings about the seemingly mechanistic and reductionist nature of the IAT. In this regard, the “thin-slicing” approach of the IAT was felt to be unable to do justice to people’s

52 psychological uniqueness and interiority (that is, their sense of personal depth and complexity, or the idea of an inner reality or space), predicated on their own understandings of themselves, their personal histories, or their daily experiences. In these kinds of response, the IAT was also trivialized, but this time in relation to the idea that it was unable to plumb the depths of their phenomenological experience. Consider the following example:

I was smugly satisfied with my results: no racial … bias. [But] how can I, having spoken with less than 10 African people in my life, state confidently that I have no bias? … It was an entertaining little study, but I for one don’t feel those 10-minute tests pried my mouth open, peered down my throat and asked, “Is there a soul in there?” (Amanda, STB-2).

This extract expresses concerns about the moral significance of an IAT result, which is found to be wanting in terms of its superficiality. It evokes individuality and interiority through its use of the word “soul”, and contrasts this with the word “little” and the short 10-minute duration of the IAT, to imply that the test barely scratches the surface of her psychological reality. Here the touchstone for judgment was personal experience, rather than “tangible social statistics”.

4.3.2.2 Political bias

The second manner in which IAT research was constructed as “dissatisfactory science” was found—somewhat ironically—in readers’ accusations of political and personal bias on the part of IAT scientists and in the design of the IAT itself. Whereas psychological scientists could be accused only of being injudicious in their formulations of prejudice in their positioning as out-of- touch, here they are accused of intentional, motivated partiality. These accusations were mounted more subtly in responses that were often marked by sarcasm or a kind of sardonic and guilty humour. These latter accounts constituted ironic displays of reflexivity about how the test might position a particular demographic as simultaneously white, liberal and guilty. For instance:

I'm a white male in his mid-30s, yet I'm good. Even subconsciously! Yes!! “The results of your test are outlined below: Your data suggest no difference in your automatic preferences for White people vs. Black people” (vkm, WMB-1).

I just took the online test you suggested, and my analysis was that I have a slight preference for black people. I guess that makes me your garden-variety guilty white liberal? (CSK, WMB-2).

The jokey sarcasm in these excerpts demonstrates an awareness of a discourse of unconscious prejudice in which guilt is automatically imputed to “whiteness”. Both responses deftly resist this indictment by sarcastically accepting it, and thereby characterizing it as itself prejudiced.

Interestingly, both are ostensibly “good” results in relation to constructions of white prejudice, but the second (CSK, WMB-2) in particular, resists this ascription of “goodness” by evoking a second common construction of the motivations of liberal whites, as engaged in egalitarian politics essentially out of guilt. These enact a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” positioning, ultimately casting these readers as victims within such discourses. In this way, both readers are positioned as having “seen through” something that was supposed to have caught them out. Thus, here and elsewhere, it was implied that the concept of implicit prejudice had been devised by the political left, targeted at the white middle class, and that the IAT was biased in its very design and somehow intended to “catch you out”. These charges are leveled more directly and angrily in the following examples.

What the test does seem to measure is the degree [to which] those in the academic sphere are willing to fall into mea culpas—“Oh, indeed, I am biased, even if I didn’t know it.” … It is not politically acceptable to say that the “bias” against the category “black” supposedly revealed by the test is actually due to the basic design of the test. One should now consider whether the authors of the test should re-examine their own biases in favor of their own work, which has got one of them a plumb (sic) job at Harvard. (CK, STB-3).

We laugh at the religious for blindly following dogma and dismissing “science”. There is as much dogma in this test methodology and the conclusions its backers draw from it (Luke, FRB-3).

What each of these extracts embodies are critiques of the IAT which portray the contamination of the scientific sphere of psychology by the intrusion of the social, political and personal domains.

4.3.2.3 Subject positions for readers: the skeptic

In my analytical comments I have focused chiefly on the ways in which IAT researchers and psychological scientists have been characterized and positioned in reader responses. However, these critical objections to IAT science positioned readers in very specific ways. In contrast to psychological scientists, who appeared in these accounts as biased, out of touch, and selfishly or politically motivated, readers were positioned as more rational and critical (in pointing out problems and objecting reasonably to the IAT), more impartial and objective (in clearly perceiving, and being more judicious in their imputations of, prejudice and racism), and finally, more reflexive and shrewd (in discerning the “motives” of the IAT, or in not having been “caught out” by it) than psychological scientists.

For analytical purposes, I will identify this as the position of the skeptic. Skepticism is traditionally associated with critical thinking—a questioning of the veracity of something purporting to be factual, a querying of imputed authority, a doubting of appearances (Pritchard, 2004). It is these kinds of qualities—usually associated with science and scientists—that were assumed in the form and style of readers’ skeptical responses to the IAT and the claims of its researchers. Such positioning relied on central features of rational, secular discourse—in, for example, references to statistics and science or appeals to personal experience—both of which are closely associated with impartiality and objectivity in public discourse (see, for example, Fish, 2010; Hakak, 2011), and historically in Western culture, with the repudiation of tradition (von Mücke, 2000).

4.3.3 Credibility: IAT trust

In contrast to the skeptical, critical accounts detailed above, trustful responses took the truth of IAT science for granted, focusing instead on the deeply personal and social implications of the detection of implicit prejudice. In these responses, the IAT took on the status of a powerful kind of diagnostic and truth-telling technology, and reader responses were characterized by language that was distinctly morally and emotionally charged. I have identified these responses, according to their content, emotional tone, and form, as (i) guilt, (ii) exhortation, and (iii) absolution.

4.3.3.1 Guilt

In “guilty” responses, the IAT was taken to have revealed something intrinsic about the moral status of the reader. This usually took the form of a shocking or embarrassing truth, which was the cause of a great deal of rhetorical hand-wringing and vexation. What is remarkable about these accounts of taking the IAT, and of the impact of implicit prejudice research, is their frequently confessional form and content. In these responses, a searching, disclosing, giving- account-of-oneself was evident, in which autobiographical details and life experiences were related as possible explanations for the particular IAT result that was obtained. Such self- scrutinizing confessionals were not limited to responses where the IAT had diagnosed a racial preference, but were also offered, somewhat surprisingly, where the IAT had declared the reader to be free of bias. Such self-accounting was also marked by a tacit valorization of displays or declarations of guilt, openness and non-defensiveness. In contrast to that of the skeptic, here the acceptance of guilt came with no irony.

I tried that Project Implicit test linked off the article, and actually I tested with a strong bias in favor of blacks. My own race is Southeast Asian, born in the U.S. Why were my results so skewed towards blacks? Is it because I was born in a predominantly black city (though I didn't grow up there)? Is it because I myself am not white? Actually, somewhat more troubling to me is not my results, but that I almost feel proud of them, when my sense of right and wrong tells me I shouldn't be proud of having an anti-white bias, much as I wouldn't be of an anti-black one. After all, in my personal habits and tastes the things I favor are quite often created by whites, though I've always considered my aesthetics “equal-opportunity” (Iris, NOC-2).

The above extract is exemplary of the many instances of morally-inflected soul-searching induced by taking the test. It resembles the kind of confessional practice that cultural theorists have argued has been accorded a privileged place in modern western society (Rail & Lafrance, 2009; Taylor, 2009). What is interesting about this and similar responses is the ways in which it constitutes a particular kind of introspective, reflexive self (cf. Foucault, Martin, Gutman, & Hutton, 1988). Consider the following extracts:

For the record, I took this test a while ago and I have a slight anti-black bias… Although I think of myself as passionately egalitarian, I'm happy to own my implicit biases and glad to be made conscious of them. Someday I hope to be able to take the same test and see how my brain feels about men and women (Jennifer, NOC-3).

When I took the test, I found the results interesting, and I am open-minded enough to be introspective and search my soul for bias of which I might have been unaware previously, as even the director of Project Implicit discovered about himself (Bob H., NOC-4).

There is a sense of moral right established in these excerpts, in which the importance of introspection and openness to criticism, or, at the very least, the willingness to examine oneself, is idealized as a kind of ethical aspiration. A further interesting aspect of both of these accounts relates to the strange sense in which a potentially damning result from the IAT is received with relative equanimity or stoicism5. In the first extract in particular, this seems to be emphasized in the tone of the statement of “someday” being able to take the IAT again, and in the reference to the brain as a separate agency which can “feel” something.

4.3.3.2 Exhortation

This category of responses was characterized by sanctimonious and highly moralized injunctions to self-examination, and the accusatory positioning of those who disagreed with, or were critical

5 I take up this theme of stoic acceptance later, in section (iii) below.

56 of the IAT, as psychologically immature and “defensive”. The injunction to confront the truth about oneself is here more directly and forcefully articulated, and the validity of anger as a response to IAT research was effectively discounted, and even pathologized in these accounts. Such responses were also marked by utopian visions of individuals who are unproblematically fair-minded, objective and unbiased, and of a tolerant society in which everyone “minds their own business” and gets on with their neighbours. I include a number of extracts here to illustrate important features of this kind of account:

Interesting that a number of these posts are angry. Is this the response of defensive people who don't want to get close enough to the truth of something to acknowledge it may have merit? Aren't blameless people more apt to respond with perplexity? (Laura, NOC-5)

Fascinating research. To me, the amount of anger and defensiveness generated by the topic only serves to underline the fact that there is still a lot of racism bubbling just below the surface of our national psyche (Maryanne, NOC-6).

Critics need to decide exactly what they are mad about—I understand how cultural defensiveness can make one throw a hissy-fit in response to being called a bigot. I also think that given the consistency and robustness in the trends, that these critics sort of have to get over it and embrace the broader, very significant, and potentially therapeutic dialogue on the topic (Averroes, HMB-1).

We alone have to dig deep into our individual hearts and minds and endeavor to eliminate any undesirable thought and negative attitude towards our fellow human beings (Mary, NOC-7).

Being a full human being involves being as free of prejudice of all kinds as possible… We should each go home and look in the mirror and recognize the ultimate Bad Guy—who ultimately must become the Good Guy to be the solution (John, NOC-8).

These types of response frequently evoked the domain of psychotherapy, and the language of psychological health, growth, and maturity in their exhortation to authentic self-disclosure. They were also notable in their use of psychoanalytic terms and metaphors, to account for negative responses to the IAT in terms of true feelings against which one could be “defensive” (Laura, NOC-5), and the invocation of psychic surface and depth (Mary, NOC-7 and Maryanne, NOC- 6). Interestingly, though the notion of psychological depth was invoked in previous skeptical accounts that cast the IAT as superficial, here implicit prejudice—as revealed by the IAT—was said to be deep inside our hearts and minds. As in the previous “guilty” responses, the prescriptions are clear: “health” and good neighborliness through self-scrutiny, courage to face the truth, admission of guilt, and elimination of negative attitudes. Psychological and moral sophistication are here conflated.

The language used in these excerpts constitutes the identities of speakers/writers as morally/psychologically advanced or sophisticated, by contrast with “others” who demonstrate their lack of sophistication or awareness in anger, denial and defensiveness. Laura (NOC-5) and Maryanne (NOC-6), for example, find people’s anger and IAT research to be “interesting” and “fascinating”, respectively. Both of their comments invoke a psychoanalytic discourse of a hidden, uncomfortable truth, the avoidance or denial of which itself signifies guilt. In both comments, the writers are positioned as seeing from the outside and having greater insight into, this hidden state of affairs; they are thus implicitly excluded from the diagnosis they impose on others. This juxtaposition of insight and defensiveness takes on a different, more rationalist inflection in Averroes’ (HMB-1) comment. Critics of IAT research are “mad”, and have “hissy- fits” while the commenter coolly observes “defensiveness” and “consistency and robustness in the trends”. All three accounts employ language that constructs others’ guilt as plainly visible to all, what Potter (1996) calls their “out-there-ness”, whereby the writers’ agency in producing those accounts is externalised and attributed to clearly observable facts.

Finally, Mary’s (NOC-7) and John’s (NOC-8) comments take up further aspects of psychoanalytic/psychotherapeutic discourse in their self-positioning but without explicit juxtaposition. In contrast to the previous comments in which the authors recede into the background, these comments foreground the author as also subject to the same injunctions being articulated in the statement. Both are interesting in their use of the words “we” and “us”. In contrast to the words “you” or “they”, “we” and “us” establish the authors’ as subject to their own exhortations. Although neither comment explicitly takes a morally or psychologically superior position, each constitutes a display of insight or acknowledgement of guilt, thus modelling the forms of subjectivity that tend to be desired in therapeutic discourse or confession.

4.3.3.3 Absolution

This third category of responses focused on the inescapability of prejudice and racism. Such accounts drew on various authoritative sources, including evolutionary psychology, references to the operations of the brain, social cognition and group theory in social psychology, in order to make the point that there was something natural and inevitable about racial prejudice, which the IAT could make apparent. Importantly, such accounts tended to be, in tone and content, stoically resigned, abstract and rational-scientific, and each constructed prejudice as “just the way we

58 are”. Readers who commented in these terms were able to position themselves—together with the rest of humankind—as absolved of blame for prejudice and racism. Examples of this include (in addition to extracts NOC-3 and NOC-4 shown above):

I do not believe we can ever get rid of racism and sexism from within ourselves. No amount of education on the importance of tolerance and equality can trump our biological instincts. (David, WMB-3).

I can't help ... realize that my [prejudiced] attitude was not influenced by any of the reasons that people who don't like blacks can give to justify their feelings, and I think that maybe blacks feel the same way toward us and blame it on the treatment whites gave them for so many years, when in reality it's an automatic feeling that would be there even if the story was completely different. Go figure... (John, NOC-9, italics mine).

The second extract is slightly different, and displays a degree of bewilderment at an apparent evacuation of meaning from the phenomenon of prejudice; that there are no “reasons” or justifications for prejudiced feelings, which instead arise automatically.

4.3.3.4 Subject positions for readers: the believer

I have already touched on some of the ways in which each type of “trustful” response to the IAT has positioned people. Drawing these aspects together, I characterize this as the position of the believer. Believers are here positioned as open and non-defensive about the possibility that they are prejudiced. They are proud to accept and to announce their potential culpability as well as their willingness to look inside themselves, and in so doing, paradoxically mark themselves as morally blameless. Furthermore, drawing on explanatory narratives of brain function, social cognition or group theory allows for a scientifically authorized vindication of bias—believers are thus merely inherently flawed, rather than malignly antipathetic. The efficacy of this positioning can be seen to draw from two powerfully prevalent and closely related discursive practices in western culture—the psychotherapeutic enactment of “insight” and its associated markers of psychological health (Rose, 1996), and the Christian discourses of sin, confession, and redemption that emphasize the potential for “sins of the mind” or conscience (Foucault et al., 1988; Taylor, 2009). The invocation of both discourses in response to the IAT provides some clues as to the ways in which the public is interpreting its moral and social significance.

4.4 Summary

In the foregoing analysis, I have argued that implicit prejudice and the IAT were constructed in public discussion in relation to a set of reflexive concerns about the credibility or truthfulness of psychological science in particular, and of science in general. Importantly, in the social space of online discussion, the negotiation of these concerns entailed demonstrations or enactments of the proper kinds of subjective positioning that good, rational scientists, and decent, modern citizens should take in relation to scientific truth, to racial prejudice, to one’s potential culpability for prejudice, and to oneself as a psychological being. In this sense, discussion of the IAT did not only pertain to the nature of (unconscious) racism and prejudice, but to the contours of an unspoken but culturally privileged ideal of modern, psychologized subjectivity. The notion of implicit or unconscious prejudice, and the claims made about the IAT as a tool that was diagnostic of one’s moral standing, occasioned on the one hand, a skeptical and critical rejection of psychological science that recruited prevailing and disparaging representations of scientists and scientific activity, and on the other, highly moralized enactments of reflexive self-scrutiny that drew from both psychotherapeutic discourses and confessional practices associated with certain versions of Christian thought. In the discussion that follows, I elaborate on the possible implications of these kinds of response for how we might understand the impact of the IAT, both for the public discourse on prejudice and consequent possibilities for anti-racist interventions, as well as for the relationship between social psychology and society. Finally, I identify some of the outstanding questions and investigative opportunities raised by these findings.

5 Discussion 5.1 Dodging prejudice

The reading of public discussion I have presented above sheds light on the cultural preoccupations and social concerns which are implicated in the public’s reception of IAT science. In particular it highlights the potential impact of IAT discourse on the public understanding of prejudice as a psychological phenomenon. In this regard, skeptical responses effectively rejected the psychological formulation of prejudice as unconscious or automatic in the light of tangible social indicators of racism, whilst trustful responses embraced it as a deep truth that was congruent with prevailing psychotherapeutic and confessional discourses. Both the skeptical and trustful responses, however, could be seen to afford readers the self-positioning as

60 essentially unbiased, whether through the more secular, rational language of evidence and statistics, or the more emotive and religiose language of confession and self-scrutiny, allowing therefore, the avoidance of a prejudiced identity.

5.2 The language of bias

As already noted, the language of non-bias (as opposed to prejudice) was an implicit and defining feature of much of the texts. Being unbiased appeared to be self-evidently valuable, and in the demonstrative contexts evoked in journalists’ narratives, in IAT researchers’ applications and experimentally structured situations, and in many readers’ examples of everyday situations—for example, in the doctor’s clinic or the courtroom—it is difficult to think outside of this moral schema. The notion of bias—arising out of and reproduced in the IAT’s paradigm of automatic preference between two options—imposes a very specific conceptual schema upon the concept of racial prejudice as a psychological phenomenon. Whereas prejudice signifies a prejudgment or pre-conceptualization of a person, which usually contains some negative content (e.g., negative stereotypes or antipathy), the schema of bias rests primarily on the notion of a leaning toward/away from one of two sides, a deviation from a middle, impartial, balanced position. The implication of this schema of bias, therefore, is of a preferred position in the impartial middle, with no particular leaning in either direction. With its juridical connotations, impartiality is a qualitatively different psychological value or ideal, than, for example, “tolerance”, or “anti-racism”, and therefore has different and potentially problematic ramifications for how racism and discrimination should be addressed (Banks & Ford, 2009). These concerns will be taken up in the concluding discussion of this dissertation.

5.3 The believer: Confession and expiation

The position of believer evoked and drew upon a pervasive and deeply ingrained obligation in Western culture to confess, and in confessing, to affirm who we are (Taylor, 2009). Today, confession has become a privileged mode of work on the self, precisely because it has become associated with sincerity, authenticity, and deciphering the truth about oneself (Brooks, 1996). Though originating in Ancient Greek and Christian contemplative practices, the discourses and institutions of mental health have also contributed to the widespread acceptance of confession as defining of healthy, modern subjectivity and moral integrity. Various benefits accrue to those who disclose themselves, since in speaking of “what we hide” we not only receive the

“satisfaction of feeling transgressive and progressive” (Taylor, 2009, p. 74), but we may also be positioned as enlightened and morally right.

Thus, the confessional declarations of guilt I have analyzed above take on a special significance in the context of racial prejudice. The social theorist Sara Ahmed (2004) has observed how such declarations are often “non-performative”, involving a fantasy of transcendence in which ‘what’ is transcended is the very ‘thing’ admitted to in the declaration (for example, if we say that we are racists, then we are not racists, as racists do not know they are racists) (para. 1).

Through such declarations, therefore, admissions of prejudice come paradoxically to signify a non-prejudiced subjectivity. A position of moral authority can thus be claimed by those who accept the diagnoses of the IAT as true, submit to the demand for self-examination, and “own” their biases in a non-defensive way. In effect, the confessional declaration that one is in fact prejudiced, is felt, by virtue of its apparent self-reflexivity, to transcend it (Hook, 2011).

5.4 Further questions for study

It is important to note here that what I have attempted to outline in this study are not “types” of individuals, nor even “perceptions” or “viewpoints” that can be held or possessed by individuals. Rather, my analytical focus has been on the forms of morally and psychologically inflected sense-making that are available to interlocutors as cultural resources, used (sometimes fluidly and contradictorily) in the flux of social interaction. The analysis of public discourse I have presented above raises some intriguing questions about the ways in which the IAT and implicit prejudice are negotiated or taken up as psychological technologies in the public domain. As already noted, whether or not the IAT and its claims were regarded as truthful, it occasioned positions in relation to it that were exemplary of two culturally valued forms of subjectivity, both of which afforded the benefit of distancing from or transcending attributions of prejudiced subjectivity.

The experience of the readers studied here clearly suggests that the test evokes strong emotions such as anxiety, frustration, or dismay, and that simply taking the test is to already find oneself positioned as potentially guilty. Indeed, journalists and the test designers themselves appeared fond of disclosing their emotions during and after the test. John Tierney of the New York Times writes of his “shock” (Tierney, 2008), Malcolm Gladwell of “feeling creepy” (Gladwell, 2005),

Anthony Greenwald of being “stunned” (in Dasgupta, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2003, p. 238), and Mahzarin Banaji of feeling “deeply embarrassed” (in Vedantam, 2005, p. W12) in response to doing the test. How is it then, that this relatively rudimentary and minimalistic test is able to evoke such intense feelings? How is the test able to embarrass or shock those who take it, even when they are skeptical of it? The experience of these emotions, their significance, verbalization, and their appropriateness or otherwise, are themselves culturally shaped (Cromby, 2011b; Stenner, 2005), and in this case, it bears investigating the extent to which it is the cultural significance of “tests” in general, and psychological tests in particular—as one of the principal means by which truths about selves are unearthed or exposed in modern, secular society—from which the IAT derives its subjective efficacy (Coon, 1993; Cravens, 1985; Danziger, 1997). In other words, in what properties of psychological tests in general, and of the IAT in particular, does its subjective effects inhere? For example, certain parallels might be drawn with cultural constructions of the “spectacular” lie detector test (see Bunn, 2007).

These aspects of the IAT could very well be investigated through a detailed examination of test- takers’ experiences of the IAT as a lie-detecting psychological test; that is, as a quintessential form of truth-telling technology. To date, very few studies have explored how the IAT is experienced by people who take it, and what meaning they make of this experience. Frantz et al. (2004) have examined the experience of taking the IAT in terms of a “stereotype threat” that might lead to “poorer” performance on the test, while Morris & Ashburn-Nardo (2010) study its usefulness as a demonstrative teaching tool in an undergraduate social psychology class. In each of these studies, the findings affirm that the experience of taking the test is in many cases highly emotionally charged. The analysis I have presented here suggests that this has much to do with how the IAT functions in public psychological discourse as an instrument that has the power/authority to reveal something of one’s moral standing as a person. While this might be accounted for by the IAT’s place in the truth discourses of psychological science and confessional culture, what particular qualities does it possess that appear to render it especially effective in calling people to account in this way?

Although the current analysis of public discourse alludes to some of these aspects of the IAT, a more specific and directed analysis of people’s experiences of taking the test would further illuminate how it might function in this way. In particular, an analysis of the lived experience of taking the IAT would provide a basis upon which to deconstruct its subjective efficacy,

63 especially in regards to the invocations of psychological truth and authenticity it occasions. As Foucault (1985) has argued, the development of psychology has resulted in the growth of a variety of “technologies of the self”, which he described as any model for “developing relationships with the self, for self-reflection, self-knowledge, … for deciphering the self by oneself, for the transformation one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object” (p. 29). In this respect it may be worthwhile to examine the IAT as a technology of the self, and to do so by regarding it—with a certain bit of distance—as a form of cultural practice. That is, what are we inviting people to do with themselves when we ask them to sit in front of a computer, look at faces and words, and react quickly to a timed task?

Finally, the findings of the present study are also suggestive of an additional question that relates to the “race” of test-takers. Both in the present study of reader comments and public debate, as well as in much of the implicit prejudice literature, whites emerge as a focus or target audience of implicit prejudice discourse, and it is typically (liberal) white participants who are shown experimentally to harbor implicit prejudices (cf. Dovidio & Gaertner, 2008). It is clear that many black participants have taken the IAT and on aggregate show a different pattern of results (see Nosek et al., 2002), but the significance of these results has not been well elaborated in comparison to that for whites.

As the “silent other” term of the binary opposition of white and black in the IAT, how might black test-takers experience and make sense of the IAT and its claims? And, specifically in terms of this dissertation, what might the experiences of black test-takers reveal about the cultural positioning of the IAT in its form (computerized, timed task) and content (racialized faces, evaluative words)?

Each of these points suggest potentially fruitful lines of inquiry that are pursued in greater detail in the second study of this dissertation.

Chapter 3 Study 2: The experience of the IAT – a hermeneutic analysis 1 Overview

In this chapter I report on a study of the lived experience of taking the IAT that extends the foregoing investigation of discourse in public media, by approaching the test as a form of social practice. This study deepens and builds upon the preceding analysis by focusing in on the ways in which the psychological truth of the IAT is produced and conveyed in relation to the activity or process of taking it, its linguistic and visual elements, and the epistemic authority of psychology itself. Additionally, the racial (white) and political (liberal) focus identified in implicit prejudice discourse is explored directly through the prism of the experiences of black people who take the test.

In taking this focus, I address a key objective of this dissertation: to understand the IAT as a form of social practice with its own social psychological implications for those whom it addresses as research subjects. By closely examining the experiences and interpretations of those who take the test, I will explore the ways in which the activity of taking the IAT is productive and provocative of the strong emotional and subjective responses I have documented thus far. I begin by laying out the theoretical framework and rationale for this study, followed by the specific methodological choices made in the course of conducting this study. This is followed by a report of the “findings”, and concludes with a discussion of their relevance.

2 Rationale

In my analysis of public discourse about the IAT in the New York Times I have delineated something of the sociocultural and political background against which this psychological test finds its significance. The analysis demonstrated that the ways in which members of the public receive, interpret and position themselves in relation to the claims of the IAT are complex and contradictory, incorporating both skeptical and confessional modes of subjectivity. Both of these positions, the skeptical and believing, can be regarded as essentially reflexive modes of engagement with psychological science; both implicate a doubt or questioning of appearances and surfaces, whether these are of face-value psychological claims or the veneers of self-

64 65

knowledge. But how are these responses provoked by the IAT? The New York Times data suggest that it is not only the IAT result presented to test-takers as diagnostic of their prejudices, but the process of doing the test that is imbued with moral/emotional significance. That is, many readers seemed to suggest that it was the IAT as a form of practice (and not solely as a form of representation) about which they felt strongly. It was also apparent from these data that people who took the test had at least a tacit understanding of what the IAT was asking them to do, and of what was expected of them as test subjects. However, the scope and methodology of this study did not allow for an exploration of these practiced or “lived” dimensions of encountering the IAT, since readers’ accounts were of varying forms, and most focused specifically on their IAT results. Although these reader comments presented certain advantages for Study 1—not the least of which is their “naturally occurring” status (see Potter & Hepburn, 2005)—they precluded any active or directed probing of these issues by myself as researcher.

Thus, the study I report on here was aimed at obtaining a deeper understanding of both the processual or lived dimensions and immediate context of taking the IAT. The questions I pose here relate to just how the IAT is able to provoke and to challenge test-takers, through a focus on accounts of its form and content. I ask, specifically, (i) how test-takers perceive its design, (ii) understand what is required of them by the test situation, and (iii) experience the process of doing the test, and (iv) how these relate to the way in which it is interpreted by test-takers. In effect, my aim in this study is to elaborate on the ways in which the subject positions identified in Study 1 are, in part, constituted by the very practice of taking the test.

In order to address these questions, I draw on frameworks employed in the sociology of scientific knowledge and the history of psychology, that view scientific instruments and experimental procedures as constitutive of social situations whose structure can be analyzed (e.g., Danziger, 1994; Rose, 1996). Through careful historical and comparative analysis, historians like Danziger (1994) have demonstrated that what we might regard simply as different methodological paradigms in psychology—for example, Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory experiments or Galton’s anthropometric procedures—entailed particular kinds of social relationship, social roles, and the division of labour, between and among experimenters and their subjects. These relationships are a direct consequence of the kinds of information being sought by psychological researchers, and are “constrained by institutional patterns that prescribe what is

66 expected and permitted for each participant” (Danziger, 1994, pp. 10-11). It follows that psychological research can only proceed where research participants are both familiar with and willing to abide by these rules. Understanding what people perceive these to be is important to understanding what they think they are doing when they participate in research. What then, are the implicit rules and expectations construed by IAT test-takers?

Danziger argues that until the 1960s, the distinctly social character of the psychological experiment had been overlooked by psychologists themselves, largely because of the (mistaken) assumption that the psychometric tests and instruments that mediated the researcher-subject relationship rendered this relationship insignificant. Where the subjectivities of the parties involved in psychological research have been acknowledged, it has entered the disciplinary discourse primarily through the concepts of social desirability, demand characteristics and experimenter effects. These are generally regarded as problems to be overcome, and of little interest in themselves. Thus, in the recent history of social psychology a great deal of attention has been paid to the development of new methodologies to bypass the predicaments of subjectivity. This is especially relevant in the case of the IAT, whose advent has been heralded as representing a real solution to such “social psychological” features of the experimental situation (see, for example, Steffens, 2004) and is thought to be relatively impervious to faking or intentional control (e.g., Kim, 2003). Furthermore, the most common medium of its administration—as software on a computer—has recently and imperceptibly become as ubiquitous, taken for granted, and invisible an everyday tool as paper and pen (see Turkle, 2004, 2009). It is therefore unsurprising that little attention has been paid to the ways in which the IAT, specifically, and computer-based psychological tests in general, constitute mediated social practices like any others. For research participants, the tacit acquiescence to experimental procedure, and the assumption of the social role or position of research subject along with its incumbent institutional expectations occurs thus, by and large, implicitly. Where these tacit expectations—and participants’ assent to or misgivings about these—become visible however, are in the various accounts research participants give of their experience of taking part in psychological research, in the “debriefing” procedures that are the standard epilogue to most researcher-subject encounters in psychology. Research into participants’ experiences of psychological research are revealing of the great importance of understanding just how they construe the purposes and meaning of the research they participate in. For example, a number of

67 recent analyses of participant debriefings in Milgram’s iconic obedience experiments reveal that participants’ did not see themselves or behave as Milgram had assumed—as naïve, autonomous individuals, or “free moral agents”— but rather, that the context of the experiment and their understanding of what was required of them as participants, had a great deal to do with whether or not they followed the experimenter’s instructions (Nicholson, 2011; Tuffin, 2004; De Vos, 2009). In their debriefings, many appeared to understand their obligation as participants to be to follow experimenters’ instructions to the best of their ability, and in turn, they expected to be treated with dignity and respect by the researchers. In this sense, Milgram’s subjects understood their role to be one of service to science, and in this regard, Nicholson argues, the significance of their experimentally derived actions must be interpreted in these terms, rather than those of the “mechanisms of obedience”. Furthermore, though many participants reported having learned a lot about themselves through taking part, these lessons had little to do with the test of moral character, or obedience per se, as Milgram believed them to be. Instead, they took their experience as a lesson in naïveté: that they had been too gullible and should be subsequently more cynical and guarded in their dealings with the world. This example illustrates the importance of understanding, rather than attempting to circumvent, the assumptions that research participants carry with them, and the sense that people make of what is required of them in the research encounter. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of understanding how particular research practices constitute a specific set of social relations between researcher and subject, and more specifically, constitute a particular kind of subject with a particular psychology (Danziger, 1994; Smith, 1988). It is this psychology of the person undergoing a psychological test that is the focus of this study.

With this in mind, I ask the question, how do participants understand what is being asked or expected of them in the IAT? From an analytical point of view, one might ask, who is the ‘experimental subject’ addressed by the IAT? In Wynne’s (1993) terms, we can rephrase this question as, how does the IAT “construct its user” by “shaping itself around the founding assumptions about user-situations, the public, or relevant social worlds?” (1993, p. 322), and what can we glean about these founding assumptions from how test-takers experience and make sense of the test, and what, if anything, they learn from it? By taking this perspective we can develop some insight into the cultural and performative basis of the test’s persuasiveness. In

68 doing so, I hope to shed further light on the significance of the IAT for the public understanding of prejudice, as well as for the public understanding of psychological science.

3 Methods 3.1 Participants

Twenty-eight participants were recruited from the University of Toronto’s downtown campus through flyers posted in highly trafficked public spaces as well as online forums. Participants received compensation of $10. Based on the objectives of the study, participants were selected according to the following criteria:

a. They were new to the formal study of psychology (no more than two months);

b. They had never taken the Implicit Association Test;

c. There were equal numbers of males and females;

d. There were equal numbers of black and white participants.

Student participants, and indeed, many with formal education in a Canadian context could not be expected to be completely naïve with respect to psychological knowledge and what goes on in psychological research (Danziger, 1994), and in fact, it was precisely this tacit knowledge of being a research subject that I hoped to make explicit. At the same time, it was particularly important that participants be relatively unfamiliar with the IAT and with the discipline of psychology, since I was interested in responses to the test that would not be coloured by a knowledge of its underlying methodology or theory, or the strictures of formal psychological discourse. Those who had studied or taken the test before might have been less likely to respond in “lay terms” or to provide frank accounts of their experience of taking the test, and were therefore excluded.

Selection by “race” was based on participants’ self-identification as black or white6. Apart from these criteria, an attempt was made to recruit as diverse a group as possible in terms of age and program of study.

The average age of the participants was 21 years and three months, ranging from 17 years and three months to 35 years and six months. Sixteen participants were born in Canada, nine were recent immigrants (had moved to Canada within the last 10 years) and the remaining three were international students. The participants were enrolled in a large variety of programs at the university, ranging from the life sciences, to business and the humanities. Only three of the 28 indicated a desire to major in psychology.

3.2 Procedure

Participants were invited to our laboratory and completed the following activities: After an informed consent process was undertaken with them (see Appendix 4 for the information sheet and consent form), they were asked to take the IAT on a laboratory computer. Immediately thereafter, they took part in an in-depth interview which explored their experience of taking the test, their interpretation of the test as a whole, as well as the test result they had obtained, and the immediate personal impact of the test and its moral implications (see Appendix 5 for the interview schedule). Finally, participants filled in a demographic questionnaire (see Appendix 6), after which they were debriefed and given the opportunity to briefly discuss the research process and its implications.

3.2.1 The web-based Implicit Association Test

Participants completed the Canadian Project Implicit web demonstration version of the “Race IAT” (available at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/canada/) on a laboratory computer, in a private room. Their test results were not recorded; however, participants were asked during the course of the interview if they were willing to share their test result with me. All participants did so. The web version of the IAT included follow-up survey questions that asked participants to

6 In using the categories or terms “black” and “white” I do not assume any natural homogeneity among those who so identify, nor do I assume any natural criteria for membership. However, their use in this study is pertinent precisely because the IAT appears to take these for granted both in its structure and use of stimulus materials.

70 indicate such things as their political affiliation, the degree of “warmth” felt for blacks or whites, and the extent to which they thought that the media had played a role in their test result. Since my objective was to replicate the same kind of test experience that any visitor to the Project Implicit website would have, all participants completed the follow-up survey.

3.2.2 In-depth interview

Once participants had completed the IAT, their experience was discussed with them in semi- structured in-depth interviews. In-depth interviews allow for focused exploration of specific phenomena and allow researchers to follow up and probe more complex ideas and experiences. In addition, the flexibility of semi-structured interviews allows for the serendipitous exploration of issues that participants bring up that were not anticipated in the initial research design (Banister, Burman, Parker, Taylor, & Tindall, 1994). The overall direction of the in-depth interviews was guided by an interview schedule (see Appendix 5) and the domains of questioning were formulated specifically to probe those aspects of taking the IAT that were not addressed in Study 1, namely of the IAT as practice. The primary emphasis of the interviews was therefore on the lived experience of taking the test. Additionally, the questions were formulated to elicit participants’ perceptions of the test content, and explored the following domains:

a. the overall experience and interpretation of the test—participants were asked to give a detailed and moment-by-moment account of their thoughts and feelings while doing the test; specifically, they were asked to respond to the words and images as well as the procedure of the IAT task;

b. their reactions to their individual test results, and what—if anything—they thought the result had to say about them and the degree to which it was congruent with their self- knowledge;

c. their thoughts about the purpose, accuracy and usefulness of the test;

d. what impact, if any, that the test had had on them, and whether it had any relevance to them beyond the laboratory context.

Since it was expected that the experience would be provocative and possibly upsetting, an emphasis was placed on setting participants at ease and obtaining their views in as non- judgmental a way as possible. Additionally, it is unlikely that they had ever been asked to give their frank reactions to a psychological test as a part of psychological research. Thus, every attempt was made to assure participants that both positive and negative views were equally valid in the interviews.

3.2.3 Audio recording and transcription

The interviews were recorded using a digital voice recorder and transcribed verbatim by a team of research assistants. Transcripts were checked by a second transcriber for accuracy. The transcription notation was selected to be appropriate to the analytical approach taken in this study. Since the study’s focus is on participants’ accounts of their lived experience of the test, with an orientation to the discursive aspects of these accounts, fine-grained linguistic features such as lengths of pauses, overlapping dialogue, and less relevant phatic responses were not transcribed (see Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). A key to the transcription notation used in this report is outlined in section 4.1. below.

3.3 Analytical approach

A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach was taken to analyzing participants’ accounts of doing the IAT, as well as their interpretation of the test experience (Willig, 2008). Such an approach attempts to understand phenomena from the actor’s point of view, as experienced and understood by her/him. According to Kvale (1996, p. 53): Phenomenology is interested in elucidating both that which appears and the manner in which it appears. It studies the subjects’ perspectives of their world; attempts to describe in detail the content and structure of the subjects’ consciousness, to grasp the qualitative diversity of their experiences and to explicate their essential meanings.

Additionally, phenomenological analysis of interview content is aimed at revealing the defining form or structure of a given category of human experience within a particular social-historical context. This requires some degree of abstraction and generalization across individuals within that context. Thus, participants’ accounts of taking the IAT were read and interpreted with a sensitivity to the quality and texture of their experience, as well as the ways in which they made sense of these experiences in relation to their knowledge of themselves and the social world.

From a hermeneutic perspective, experience is inseparable from the sense made of it, since at its most fundamental level, experience is already structured—anticipated and contextualized—by our concrete existence in a particular historical moment, what some phenomenologists call our “fore-understanding” of the world (see Lye, 1996). Furthermore, in order to articulate experience we must draw upon common signs and symbols, that is, our culturally shared frameworks of sense-making. From this perspective, the ideal of achieving generalized descriptions of “pure” phenomenological structures or essences, characteristic of transcendental phenomenology (Husserl, 1970), was here eschewed, and participants’ accounts were approached as always already mediated by the social and cultural meanings of race, racism, psychological research, test-taking, and invariably, the interview situation.

But while experience is not reducible to our articulation of it in language, it is through our articulation of it that our experience is brought into being (Ricoeur, 1975). In relation to the self, therefore, hermeneutic phenomenology proposes similarly that “the constitution of self is contemporaneous with the constitution of meaning” (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 159). This latter point is crucial to the relevance of a hermeneutic approach to the question of the subject constituted by the IAT. As participants reflect on and articulate their responses to the IAT, how are they constituted in relation to it?

An additional principle of hermeneutic analysis that follows from the above statements is that the process of interpretation is inherently circular—it is impossible to come to an understanding of something without some presuppositions about the sense that will be made. This “hermeneutic circle” is best illustrated when we consider that the parts of something can only be understood through an understanding of the whole, and that the whole can only be understood through understanding its parts (Schmidt, 2006). This means that the process of interpretation involves an iterative and circular movement from presupposition to interpretation and back again. This iterative process was a key feature of the analysis conducted here. A further related analytical note is relevant. Hermeneutic-phenomenological analysis does not claim to produce a “true”—in the sense of a definitive and final—reading of participants’ accounts (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). The meaning that is derived from these data should be considered a co-construction of participant and analyst in that is a product of the analyst’s interpretative engagement with it, both in the textual analysis itself, and earlier still, in the conduct of the interview (Willig, 2008).

The analysis proceeded according to Willig’s (2008) guidelines to phenomenological analysis. First, each of the interview transcripts was read and re-read for its initial meanings. Observations, associations, comments on language use, absences, descriptive labels, and summary statements were recorded for each interview transcript. Second, major conceptual themes were identified and labelled. Thereafter, the third stage involved an introduction of structure into the analysis, whereby the themes identified in step two were clustered or organized in hierarchical fashion based on shared meanings or references. These “higher-order” themes were then checked against the portions of text that were used to generate them in an iterative process, in order to ensure consistency. In this case, because of the clear structure introduced by the interview guide, the analysis very naturally clustered around particular domains of questioning and discussion.

Fourth, summary tables of the thematic structures identified were produced for each interview, together with one or two illustrative quotations for each theme. In this process, only those themes deemed central to the experience were retained, while others were discarded. Fifth, in order to achieve a degree of integration across cases and arrive at a more generalized understanding of the phenomena, themes that were common to, or related in some way across the interviews were further structured into superordinate themes. Again, this was performed in a cyclical, iterative manner, and the themes were checked against, and grounded in the interview transcripts.

Finally, in line with the purposes of this study, a critical and reflexive interpretation of these themes was undertaken through consideration of the inherently social bases upon which meanings are derived. Firstly, while the phenomenological focus of this study emphasizes participants’ individual subjective experiences of the IAT, it is clear that their accounts of the latter are neither entirely idiosyncratic nor free-floating; rather, they are bound up with, and draw from, social interactions and processes (language and culture) that are shared between social actors (2008). Thus, attention was given to the socially shared symbolic resources upon which these accounts drew in constructing the meaning of participants’ experiences. Secondly, attending to the social production of meaning in the interviews meant that a reflexive stance towards my own position as researcher and psychology graduate student needed to be taken. In this sense, I attempted to articulate the ways in which my own assumptions and presuppositions were implicated in the structuring of the study, interview questions and discussion, language use and reading of the interviews (Kvale, 1996).

3.4 Methodological issues

While recruitment of respondents through participant pools is generally regarded as unproblematic in psychological research, taking this approach raises important questions for the current study, particularly with regard to power relationships and how this structured the way participants saw me. For example, since participants were enrolled in an introductory psychology course, and I identified myself as a psychology graduate student, they may have been less inclined to express thoughts that were critical of the test or of the research process as a whole. At the same time, however, it is precisely this context of institutional authority and expertise that was of interest in this study, and the interviews were conducted and analyzed in an attempt to explore this. Further discussion of these reflexive considerations and their implications for the reading produced here will be provided subsequent to the interview analysis.

4 Analysis 4.1 Overview

The analysis is organized according to the following interview domains and superordinate themes. My organization of these interview domains reflects a rough approximation of the interview guide and comprises the following:

a. Doing the IAT (what was it like to undergo the test?);

b. Significance of the IAT (what sense was made of the test as a whole?);

The first domain corresponds most closely with the content of a phenomenological analysis, since it is here that I address the primary question of the lived experience of completing the IAT. This part of the analysis explicates most clearly the manner in which the subject positions identified in Study 1 are constituted in the process of taking the test, in terms of the production of an experience of psychological truth. The second domain, though largely crucial to the understanding of the first, represents participants’ more “theoretical” reflections on what the test means and how it works, and is therefore considered separately from the first. These divulge some of the “founding assumptions” of the test and the ways in which test-takers contextualize the meaning of what is purportedly revealed by a result.

Within each of these domains I have identified several superordinate themes that capture the overall categories of meaning in the interviews (see Table 4 below). My analytic discussion will concentrate on this latter level of meaning since these articulate something of the essential character of the experiences shared and meanings made by participants. As was expected, while there were many themes that could be said to be generally shared by the participants, there were some important divergences between black and white participants that warranted a separate discussion of each (marked by asterisks in Table 4 below). Additionally, where certain experiences were not shared, I made interpretive judgments about whether to discard or retain these for analysis. In this respect, criteria of theoretical relevance or novelty guided these choices (Willig, 2008).

Table 4: Structure of the analysis

Interview domain Superordinate theme Theme(s) • Being put on the spot/exposed − Anticipation of judgment − Feeling manipulated or tricked

• Wanting to “do well” on the test − Concern with performance (moral & cognitive)

• Feeling moral censure/failure − Shame/embarrassment/pride Doing the IAT − Accusation of racism (white)* − Accusation of disloyalty (black)*

• Feeling offended (black)* − Distressing feelings, memories, associations − Dislike of faces; dislike of task

• Detached − Meaningless game or test of concentration • Inaccurate but effective − Useful demonstration/placebo; self-doubt − Potentially harmful Significance of the IAT • Racially incongruous/specific − A test by, and for, white people

• Evokes everyday public prejudice − “Real-life” examples

* Refers to participants’ race

In exploring the overall experience and process of the test, five superordinate themes were identified that capture what it was like to do the Implicit Association Test, namely, (1) “Being put on the spot/exposed”, (2) “Wanting to do well on the test”, (3) “Feeling moral censure/failure”, (4) “Feeling offended”, and (5) “Detached”. The experiences of black and white participants diverged in important ways here: many black participants expressed strong feelings

76 about the appearance and symbolism of the IAT, such as the words and faces to which they had to respond, while all but one white participant appeared not to have noticed or be bothered by these features. Additionally, black and white participants interpreted their IAT results very differently, particularly where a pronouncement of “preference” or “bias” was obtained. On the whole, these speak very clearly to the manner in which the subject positions—particularly those associated with guilt—identified in Study 1 are produced in the moment-by-moment practice of taking the IAT. Additionally, the inclusion of black participants’ accounts of taking the test reveals something of the founding assumptions of the social world imagined in the IAT.

In terms of the ways that participants’ made sense of the significance of the IAT, three superordinate themes emerged, namely, (1) “Inaccurate but effective”, (2) “Racially incongruous/specific”, and (3) “Evokes everyday public prejudice”. In general, the first two of these themes resonate very closely with the skeptical positions discussed in Study 1, while the third suggests another of the implicit assumptions that are made in the test. Finally, my analysis concludes with a discussion of some of the important interactional features of the interviews which help to contextualize the reading I have given here.

Having sketched in broad terms my overall findings, I will now discuss in detail each superordinate theme, providing illustrative excerpts from the interview transcripts. Participants are identified by pseudonyms, as well as their gender and race (i.e. B=black, W=white, F=female, M=male; e.g., white male = WM). Phatic utterances including laughing or sighing, for example, are included in square brackets where these are mine [like so] and in round brackets where they are the participant’s (like this). I include longer sequences of interviews with some of my own questions in some cases to help contextualize participants’ responses.

4.2 Doing the IAT

Each of the five superordinate themes discussed below describes an important aspect of the experience of taking the IAT. Although these are distinct themes, it should be noted that their full significance can be appreciated only in their relations to each other, and that specific participants did not necessarily feel/express all of them, nor in combinations of what might be expected to be an “attitudinally consistent” manner. For example, a particular participant might have expressed several contradictory feelings, such as being both offended by and detached from the test

77 experience. An important initial comment to be made here is that participants appeared to grasp intuitively what the test required of them, even if they were not clear “what it was about”.

4.2.1 Being put on the spot/exposed

“Being put on the spot/exposed” captures the sense of being both closely examined and being unprepared for this, in the course of doing the test. This experience was one of apprehension and anxiety, and was directly linked with the fear that performance on the test would result in an appraisal of moral integrity. This theme pervaded participants’ accounts of the test process and thus in many respects constitutes the backdrop for all other themes. Additionally, there was a distinctly temporal dimension to this experience, and in many cases, participants described growing increasingly anxious as the test progressed and as they began to “make mistakes” and grasp the mechanics and purpose of the test. Participants felt unprepared for this, and the overall sense was one of being ‘ambushed’ or caught by surprise. The following quotes, from Alice and Arnold, are illustrative: I was definitely thrown off guard and becoming more conscious of what it was testing me for [mhmm] and I guess because I became conscious of that, I guess I sort of got even… not necessarily anxious, I guess that’s sort of over-exaggerating, but just… concerned about what was going on, and what my results were going to be… (Alice, WF).

After the first mistake I thought oh crap I’m a racist… After maybe the fourth or fifth one, I thought oh man, this reflects something about me, I’m gonna have to think about this. Like I just felt bad about it ‘cause I thought I would be able to be above it (Arnold, WM).

The sense of growing apprehension described here, though strongly related to the experience of performing the test, witnessing one’s mistakes or hesitations, and anticipating an embarrassing or condemnatory judgment, seemed also to be understood to be what one should expect as a subject undergoing psychological research in general. This apprehension pertained to the idea that the knowledge that psychology attempts to gain from people is, for all intents and purposes, hidden, and potentially embarrassing if revealed. For example, When people go to take a psychology test, they feel like they’re kind of under the microscope but they don’t even really know (laughs) what uh will be gained from them, you know, [mhmm] from their responses so… I guess they just try to perform… and then of course there may be some performance anxiety kind of thing (Donald, WM).

In a related way, this apprehension about being exposed or judged appeared alongside a concern that the test was designed to be purposefully deceptive or manipulative. Participants felt “set up” or “tricked” into making mistakes and performing the test in a way that would produce a racial

78 preference, and they therefore worried that their actual beliefs would be misrepresented by the test. I guess what most… experiments, like, psychological experiments… I kind of always expect something else; something kind of… more hidden, underlying type of thing, so… I’m always kind of looking out for it, (chuckling) [mhmm] and trying to figure it out (Clarisse, WF).

Mostly, I just felt like it was trying to trick me and I’m the kind of person that… likes to one-up everyone (laughs) even if it is the computer, [mhmm] so I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to fall for your tricks!’ (Shona, WF).

It’s trying to find out like how I really think about certain people, and at one point I even thought, ‘That’s what they want me to do! They want me to make these mistakes.’ (Michelle, BF).

Perceiving that the test was purposefully “tricky”, many participants reported actively attempting to both guess the underlying purpose of the test and to find ways to actively “outsmart” it. These intentions are explored in the next superordinate theme.

4.2.2 Wanting to do well on the test

“Wanting to do well on the test” captures the desire expressed by participants to perform capably, to make as few mistakes as possible, and to outwit or “beat” the test. This was articulated in two senses: one in which performing the IAT task was imbued with moral significance, such that each mistake or hesitation was felt to signal a moral failure, and a second more “mechanical” interpretation, where the IAT task was perceived as a form of computer or video game that had to be defeated or overcome. In the latter case, the IAT was understood to be a test of coordination, motor skills and/or concentration—a cognitive test with little or no moral meaning, while in the former, each push of a button was felt to carry diagnostic or moral weight, potentially revealing of a transgressive lapse or deficiency. In this respect, the IAT was tacitly understood to be a direct test of racist proclivities, despite the fact that the language used in the website’s introduction to the IAT, as well as in its description of the result, is relatively neutral and careful (the website states that the result simply “suggests an automatic preference”). Brad, a white male, expressed it this way: “I was kind of disappointed with my mistakes, because I am not a racist”. In both of these senses (moral and mechanical), although for different reasons, participants expressed a desire to “perform well” on the test, whether this meant “rocking a high score” (Jack, WM) or not making potentially revealing mistakes, and thus the test was experienced predominantly as a test of, and challenge to, their skills or capabilities (whether of virtue, self-possession or concentration). To one participant, for example, the IAT evoked

79 memories of the Scholastic Assessment Tests (SATs) used for college admission in the US (Max, BM) (the sense that one could produce a virtuous performance, through effort, is explored in greater detail in section 4.2.3. below).

Whether or not participants described being cognizant of the actual purpose or construing the moral implications of the test, many reported coming up with active strategies for succeeding at the IAT task, such as self-talk, “telling themselves stories”, visualizing famous black people or infamous white people, and physically rearranging the keyboard. The following quotes are illustrative: JY: So, I want to uh… kind of go back to the task itself um… was there… or at least do you remember feeling anything or thinking anything while you were doing the actual task?

Jack (WM): Um, yeah. I totally wanted to rock a high score.

I’m kinda tooting my own horn here but the first time when I didn’t get any wrong I was really happy about that. And I was like “ha-ha, I know you” (Jerome, BM).

Where strategies for completing the IAT were not so successful, the experience of making mistakes was highly “frustrating” and baffling for many participants. What was frustrating, as they described it, was the sense of not being in possession or control of one’s reactions or responses and of an incongruity or mismatch between their intentions and their mistakes. Essentially, these mistakes were felt to occur despite one’s best efforts. I felt like I made more mistakes um, in that section and I was like, ‘Oh no!’ [laughs], like, ‘I’m not supposed to be making mistakes here because I really don’t have a preference.’ (Shona, WF).

The more mistakes I made, the more annoyed and agitated I got. [mhmm.] ‘Cause I generally don't like making mistakes, especially when like you see it, and you think one thing, and you, like, your hand does the other thing, and you're just like, ughh. [Mhmm.] So. (Maxine, WF).

So it’s really frustrating, like, I kept on thinking, ‘What is it that’s making me make mistakes?’ (Michelle, BF).

4.2.3 Feeling moral censure/failure

This third superordinate theme primarily addresses the experience of receiving a result at the conclusion of the IAT. As can be discerned from the preceding analytical comments, it also, in an anticipatory way, foreshadowed the experience of performing the test. It is very closely related to the overall feeling of being put on the spot and caught off guard, and captures the considerable moral-emotional significance that an IAT result held for participants, regardless of whether the result was said to indicate a racial preference or not. The disclosure of the result by

80 the website, and participants’ accounts of this event in the interviews, showed that this revelation came with great emotional import. Where the IAT had indicated a racial preference, there were two distinct qualities to this feeling. First, there was a sense that the test had exposed some duplicity or dishonesty, and when understood in this way, embarrassment or shame characterized the experience. Second, a revelation of preference could also be understood as a failure to live up to one’s ideals, whether these pertained to egalitarianism, or to the ability to perform a test without mistakes. It was thus a guilty failure or disappointment of oneself. The first seemed primarily to be related to the social experience of being exposed or embarrassed, while the second was articulated in a more private sense. These two interpretations were intermingled in some accounts. Some participants found some consolation—or alternatively, felt worse—when comparing their result to the bar chart representation of the overall distribution of automatic race preference among “web respondents”, which accompanies the presentation of the IAT result. The following quotes are representative. I thought, ‘Okay, I guess they caught me this time.’ [laughs], because, you know, I just wasn’t- I wasn’t on top of my game and I knew that they’d caught me with something (Sam, WM).

I mean like in general, I don’t really like making mistakes all the time. And um, I thought if I focused hard enough then I’ll- I’ll be able to get by certain things like prejudice (Arnold, WM).

[I'm] really disappointed [mhmm] in myself, just… because… I don't know, ‘cause you… I thought I didn't show, like, an extreme preference. I mean, I would have been disappointed in myself if I had shown preference in either way, but in a way, it's kind of worse that I showed preference… to Europeans (Maxine, WF).

JY: So it was surprising to get that result?

Abdi (BM): Yes. Because we all like to be, uh, to assume we’re all- every one of us are (sic) colour blind, [yeah] yeah.

In both Sam’s and Arnold’s quotes above there are some interesting interpretive nuances that can be drawn out. Sam’s in particular illustrates the feeling of exposure and duplicity, but both suggest that the moral failure—represented by the test result—could have been overcome through sheer effort (e.g., being “on top of my game”; “if I focused hard enough”). Thus there is some ambiguity here as to whether the sense of failure pertained to a shortcoming in “unbiasedness” or impartiality, or a lapse of self-possession. It is also worth noting, despite these clearly expressed regrets (in the extracts above), that in many respects, the feelings accompanying the reception of an IAT result were far from unambiguous. This was due in part to the fact that participants felt hurried, tricked or manipulated by the test. Thus, participants felt

81 simultaneously responsible and not responsible for their IAT results. Alice, a white female, put it this way: JY: [So] when it gave you the result you… felt… um… almost uh, not…

Alice (WF): …an inherent guilt that you don’t feel responsible for at the same time [That’s interesting.], if that makes sense? [mhmm].

In fact, where a racial preference had been indicated by the IAT, there was often a sense of ambivalence about the result, which participants explained had to do with the feeling that it had been forced or tricked out of them. There is therefore a close relationship between this theme and the very first one.

IAT results had an entirely different significance for black participants, particularly in the case of a result of an automatic preference for white people. Here, participants took offense at what was felt to be an accusation of self-betrayal, or disloyalty to one’s “own race”. It’s completely wrong. I don’t have a preference. [mhmm] No. I’m—yes—I’m very linked to my group obviously ‘cause I grew up in Nigeria, I’ve lived in Nigeria my whole life, I just moved here like what, 2 years ago? So obviously I’m linked more with the Africans than the Europeans (Justine, BF).

You start off with like, one set and then they switch it on you [mhmm], so like, you’re so used to pressing that button and then they tell you like ‘oh, you hate blacks more because you, umm, y- you responded faster to like, the good and the white’ (Linda, BF).

In both cases above, Linda and Justine express incredulity at the implications of the IAT result. Linda’s excerpt in particular illustrates the strong interpretation of the implications of the IAT result, which, as I have noted above, occurred in spite of the careful wording of the test.

Neutral (no preference) results were usually reported with pride and/or self-satisfaction, and sometimes surprise. There were two different meanings to this response that are somewhat analogous, though inversely, to the feelings of embarrassment or disappointment described above. Thus, satisfaction was expressed at both the good performance of the test (correctly performing the task, getting a “high score”) as well as the moral qualities of impartiality and tolerance that the result was taken to signify. Thus, in the following quotes, Jack attributes his neutral result to his background and “comfort” with different races, while Jerome and Naomi, both black participants, were surprised at what they took to be their lack of partiality or prejudice.

Honestly, I am so comfortable with race relations, it’s not even funny. My family is so bloody diverse… like, directly (mhmm), it’s so bloody diverse it’s not even funny (mhmm) so yeah (Jack, WM).

I thought I would like black people more than white people (laughs). And I was like, ‘oh okay, that’s cool.’ (Jerome, BM).

JY: How did you feel it [taking courses on Caribbean history] might have influenced your results?

Naomi (BF): Um… I thought it would maybe make me more prejudiced… towards whites, because, like, seeing other recent details of the Caribbean, um, how they got their revolution, how the slavery wars happened and all that stuff, I thought I would be more angry, but I wasn’t.

4.2.4 Feeling offended

The fourth major way in which the IAT was experienced—“feeling offended”—is of special significance for black participants. Almost no white participants expressed offense, and this result speaks to the ways in which participants found themselves positioned racially by the IAT, an interpretation I return to in subsequent parts of this thesis. “Feeling offended” encapsulates the sense of insult or offense felt by black participants when confronted by the IAT. Here the nature of the task and the specific words and images used in the test evoked anger and painful memories and associations for black participants. Two aspects of the test itself appeared to be salient in this regard: first, the task of associating black faces with bad words, and second, the appearance of the faces. In regard to the former, participants felt affronted by the task of reproducing negative associations and stereotypes in the test, expressing anger and hurt and even the desire to discontinue the test. When exploring this further, participants reported that the task evoked recollections of painful incidents of racism in their own lives, and also reminded them of the existence of socially shared negative associations with blackness. It was also suggested that the test might actually reinforce such associations, both among people with racist tendencies and in “society at large”. Offended black participants here clearly identified with or were positioned as targets of racism.

Secondly, the faces used in the IAT also provoked negative responses from participants, who felt that the black faces in particular were “ugly”, “suspicious”, “intimidating”, or “warped”, specifically in contrast to the white faces used in the test. Taken together, black participants had considerable misgivings about doing the test, but all continued with the test regardless of these. The following excerpts illustrate some of the nature of these responses, and black participants’ general experience of the test process:

When I was reading, like, the different sections between, like, black and white, I was like, okay, this is going to be racist, I will come out angry, and possibly I might just mess up this entire thing. So, as I progressed, the first one that they brought up was, um… I think it was white is to good and then black is to bad. And I was like, “I’ve grown up with this stereotype all my life, and… here it is before me” (Naomi, BF).

I know from like experience from when I was younger like um people would say stuff to me and then like… it just kind of, I guess, brought up old feelings for a minute [yeah] like not for long, just for a minute or whatever and then um… like putting the word like ‘awful’ to like an actual group of people, not even like a specific person [mhmm] but a group of people like I just felt really uncomfortable for a minute… but after awhile, the only reason that I got through the test I was like, ‘Okay, it’s just like some kind of- this is the test or whatever like I need to go on’, but for a minute I got a little heated (Max, BM).

JY: So, um… can you tell me more about the initial reaction, and uh… when you saw what the test was doing or what, what it was showing you, that you felt a bit angry? Like what… was happening there?

Naomi (BF): ‘Cause for me, growing up in Canada, I felt… I grew up in Edmonton; that's basically Alberta’s, I'd call it the hick of Canada, because it’s so white, and I was the only black child in my school for an entire year, until, like, maybe Junior High? And so, like, seeing that just brought back so many memories of my childhood… I also was discriminated against in my school. I was called, ‘black like dirt,’ ‘my nose is big,’ all that stuff. And so, like, it just rehashed a lot of memories for me, and initially, like, I-I didn't want to take it. I was like, ‘Oh, goodness, this is not a good time to remember everything’. So, that was… it took me back quite some time.

4.2.4.1 Pushing on, “for science”

In a less severe way, though no less significantly, a number of participants—both black and white—expressed reservations about the test and what it required one to do; that is, to perform the test within a racial and evaluative dichotomy (i.e. black-white; good-bad), and under a time limit. Interestingly however, participants would “suspend” their doubt or misgivings about the format of the test “in the interests of science” (Donald, WM). Both Max’s and Donald’s excerpts included in previous sections are exemplary of this, as is the following elaboration from Max: Max (BM): You can’t really… put a word on an entire race of people by saying like ‘yeah, because you’re that, then you’re a bad person or because you’re this, you’re a good person.’ (yeah) It was just a little weird—I first I thought like um… there was going to be like another option so like I was missing a few of them because like I was trying to uh, like it’s like ‘Okay, let me put that over here’ [laughs], you know what I’m saying? ‘I can’t do that, let me just do that anyways.’ (mhmm) And that was working so I was like ‘okay, I have to finish and let’s see where this test goes…’

JY: Um, so what made you kind of think like, ‘Well let me try a different option that they haven’t given me’?

Max: Uh, I don’t know, it was just, I didn’t really… ‘cause I knew it wasn’t possible. I just thought like… I was kind of um… not offended but [laughs] but actually a little offended (mhmm) but um, yeah something told me to like ‘let me see if there’s another option or possibility’—which there wasn’t so I kept going.

4.2.5 Detachment

The final theme identified in participants’ experience of the IAT is closely related to the experience of the test as a computer game or test of coordination/concentration. For some, the test was experienced as an overly simplistic and trivial skill test. For example, Sophie, a white female, put it this way: JY: And- and what do you think the, um, the different results would- would mean? I mean, what- what would the results mean? Sophie (WF): Whether you were paying attention or not. (both chuckle). JY: Do you think it was the- the, the original aim of the test, or was that- that’s your- how you experienced it? Sophie: That’s how I experienced it. [mhmm.] If you’re paying attention to it, it’s pretty easy to respond to it.

People who talked about experiencing it in this way did not ascribe much significance to either their performance of the test or to their result, but as I have mentioned above, some described this experience of detachment while performing the test, but not in their reaction to their results.

4.3 The significance of the IAT

The following superordinate themes move on from the focus on participants’ experience, towards their interpretations of the IAT itself; that is, what they thought its purpose is, how it works, and how useful the test is. Though these reflections on the meaning of the test were not strictly divorced from participants’ accounts of the experience of doing the test, they represent participants’ thoughts, ideas and speculations about the IAT. They are reported separately here and regarded as reflexive discourse that discloses the ways that the test, related psychological concepts, and the discipline of psychology itself were contextualized by the participants. In particular, they speak to some of the more skeptical responses to the IAT discussed previously in Study 1.

4.3.1 Inaccurate but effective

“Inaccurate but effective” captures the sense that the IAT was not considered a worthwhile scientific instrument, in the sense of deepening our collective understanding of racism and prejudice, but that it was especially compelling for participants as a demonstrative tool. Participants could see many uses for the test when thinking of people in their lives whom they regarded as unknowingly prejudiced (e.g., their parents or siblings). Therefore, despite expressing doubts about the IAT’s contributions to knowledge, participants thought that it could

85 be used to present concrete evidence of prejudice to those who (obstinately) did not see themselves as prejudiced. For this reason, too, participants saw potential for misuse of the test. For example: Um… I don’t know if it helps us to understand prejudice better or whether it just shows how much prejudice there actually is (Amber, WF).

Even if it's not really accurate, at least it reminds you that there are these prejudices and that you have to be careful and you have to be self-aware, and… you have to sort of take that step back and look at what you're doing (Maxine, WF).

This… test provides the data and it’s harder to just dismiss data. So I can see how that would help people identify and come to terms with, with like a racial bias? (Jonathan, WM).

JY: Is this a… uh, a kind of test that you might recommend to people to do, or not?

Clarisse (WF): Um… I don't know. I… it would depend on who I would re… if I wanted to kind of scare someone [laughs] I would, maybe. But I-I'm not sure if I'm one hundred percent faithful in the accuracy.

I definitely wouldn’t just give it to someone and say, “Do it!” and have them… make them feel bad about themselves [laughs]. I don’t feel that would be right (Sam, WM).

Thus, as is illustrated in the excerpts above, there was some doubt expressed as to the “accuracy” of the test, particularly as it related to the participant him/herself. However, the test was seen as efficacious in convincing others of their own unconscious or denied prejudice.

4.3.2 Racially incongruous/racially specific

This theme encapsulates the sense that the test was more appropriate or fitting to the experience of one race than another. For black participants this was articulated in terms of the test being useful as a confirmation of others’ automatic prejudice: something they already knew exists from first-hand experience. This notion was closely associated with the perception, noted above, that the black faces in the test were unnecessarily “ugly” or “intimidating”, and that the good and bad words they were required to match with them were unusually formal. For this reason, there was a suggestion that the test was more suited as a demonstration of the existence of prejudice for white people. Max, a black male, described the words used in the IAT in this way: “black people don’t use words like ‘awful’ and like I don’t really hear a lot of black people saying ‘wonderful’” (Max, BM). For white participants, the test was seen as especially effective at tapping into “white guilt”. Interestingly, no one expressed the idea that the test was more suited to black people. Take the following excerpts for example:

I feel like a lot of black people know that [prejudice] exists but they don’t really have to do much work to find out about it because they go through it a lot. So like with white people, they want to see, ‘Oh, let’s experiment on this!’ But black people don’t need to do that because they know it happens and like they go through it almost every day (Michelle, BF).

So just the, the notion of you know, how white people will kind of… make an, almost like an effort to… prove that they aren’t… um, to prove they’re not racist and they’re kind of trying to prove that to everyone, maybe even themselves and uh… but not necessarily out of a moral sense of inclusiveness but just a general… I guess it’s that they feel, they’re already judged as racist… and so they’re already judged as ‘wrong’ [mhmm] in a certain way [mhmm] and then they’re trying to atone for that. So I mean, a test where it’s got the white-black, which is, of course, just the dichotomous, the- you know, the very- it’s the binary kind of thing, right? Uh… so in a test that has that and is… is trying to have these associations, ‘bad’-‘good’, it seems like it might, it might be… trying to um discover white guilt or… you know what I’m saying? (mhmm) Like, play on that kind of, maybe, I don’t know (Donald, WM).

These extracts illustrate the different ways in which black and white participants referenced the race-specificity of the IAT. For Michelle, the test is expressive of whites’ curiosity about racism. In the second excerpt, Donald explicates the notion of white guilt as a social-cultural practice and speculates—based on its design—that the test has been made to investigate or capitalize on this.

4.3.3 Everyday public prejudice

For both sets of participants, the IAT was highly evocative of real-life examples or recollections of prejudice. What is remarkable about these everyday examples is that they were of a very specific type. Consider the following exchange between myself and Abdi, a black male: JY: So the result that they gave you, basically, is based on this kind of like quick reaction, right? (Yes) Do you think it’s, that it would ever happen to you, that that kind of situation would happen in your real life? (Yes) Yeah? (Yes) What kind of situations do you think those would be?

Abdi (BM): You know, white women running away from me and holding to their bags whenever I come close. [mhmm] Yeah, happens all the time.

“Everyday public prejudice” refers to the ease with which participants related the test experience or the test paradigm with examples from “real life”. Whether or not participants regarded the test to be either generally useful or generally pointless, when asked whether there were any “real- life” situations to which the test might apply, participants came up with examples that shared remarkably similar characteristics. Specifically, the contexts most easily evoked by the IAT were brief, singular, anonymous public encounters with racial others, in which some notion of safety or danger was implicated, for example, “on the street”, “in an alleyway”, or “on the subway”. Two participants related the test to the killing of Trayvon Martin in the United States, in which the role of race prejudice occupied the media consciousness at the time of interview (see Weems,

2012, for a summary and analysis). While these contexts might seem obvious or self-evident to those familiar with the test, it is remarkable that other kinds of interactions (e.g., more prolonged, with familiar people, etc.) in other contexts (e.g., the workplace, classroom or private settings) did not come up in any of the interviews. For example: Maybe, unconsciously, I would tense up if I was walking down the street with a… an African- American kid looked at me in a hoodie, or something like that, but I really, I would highly doubt it, so… (Clarisse, WF).

I’d be just walking down, you know, St. George Street, looking around at various faces and seeing like, you know… just asking myself who… who would I trust at first sight? (Sam, WM).

But it’s not just… umm, a person’s ethnicity, it’s the way they carry themselves. [mhmm] If I prefer Caucasian people, but I see a Caucasian people- person that I don’t really feel is safe or something, I would not like them, just as much as somebody else. (Sophie, WF).

With white people it’s kind of like… or any other race, you know… like they’re just people you can trust, you know, like in everyday situations on the street (mhmm) like you feel safer towards them, you know? (Sebastian, BM).

The similarities among these examples shed light on the contexts to which the IAT is seen to be relevant, and I comment further below on what this might suggest about the test.

4.4 Integrative analytical summary and interpretation

My hermeneutic-phenomenological analysis of participants’ accounts of doing the IAT yielded a number of superordinate themes that capture what it was like to take the IAT. In the summary that follows, I attempt an interpretive and descriptive précis that reconstructs what I have analysed above, in a way that brings together the processual, textural and symbolic qualities of the experience (Chamberlain & Hodgetts, 2008; Holloway & Todres, 2003).

On the whole, to take the test was to feel oneself unexpectedly exposed to psychological and moral scrutiny, and therefore to the possibility of shame, embarrassment or condemnation. The overriding sense was one of being taken by surprise, or blindsided. The performance of the test was thus imbued with apprehension and sometimes anxiety, and a strong desire to do well on the test and thereby conceal any prejudice, hypocrisy or failure of self-possession. Where this was the case, the IAT was tacitly understood to be a test of racist tendencies, and this sense pervaded and lay beneath the dismay and foreboding that grew with each mistake on the IAT tasks. Even where the moral weight of the test was not so acutely perceived, it was still important to avoid errors because this signified cognitive skill and ability. In this respect, the IAT was tackled like a

88 tricky computer game or test of coordination and concentration that resembled other kinds of computer-based tests that had been previously encountered. Making and witnessing one’s own errors in doing the tasks was both frustrating and baffling, primarily because these errors occurred unintentionally and in spite of one’s best efforts. Additionally, the IAT was perceived to be intentionally deceptive or tricky, leading to impressions that it had been deliberately designed to deceive, unsettle and thereby expose the test-taker. However, despite these reservations, all participants proceeded with the test, expressing some faith both in the goodwill of the researcher and in the interests of science. For black participants in particular, to take the test was to be vividly confronted with reminders of societal associations and stereotypes of one’s own “race”, and the requirement to reproduce these associations in order to correctly perform the test was experienced as insulting or offensive. This task was also strongly evocative of painful past experiences of, on the one hand, being subject to racism, and on the other, of accusations of self-hatred or disloyalty for being “white-washed”. Moreover, the test’s design, wording and imagery were perceived as incongruous with black “culture”, and the impression was that the test had been presumably intended for a white audience. These features distinguished black and white participants’ tacit positioning in relation to the test; for the former, the test was evocative of the position of target of racism, while for the latter, the IAT provoked feelings and concerns related to the role of perpetrator. Both black and white participants clearly recognized this positioning, and the latter viewed the test as especially useful for demonstrating the phenomenon of hidden prejudice to those who might be resistant to identifying it in themselves.

IAT results were received and understood to be appraisals of moral standing, in spite of the consistent use of morally neutral language in all of the study materials (e.g., consent forms, IAT instructions, wording of IAT results etc.). Thus, results that indicated an automatic preference were a source of shame, disappointment or guilt, while those that indicated no automatic preference were a source of pride, accomplishment or self-affirmation. Results indicating a racial preference were not all understood to be morally wrong in themselves however, and were discomfiting only insofar as they revealed an inconsistency or duplicity, a discrepancy between the outward appearance or expectation of egalitarian attitudes, and the inward harbouring of “secret” preferences. A third sense of disappointment pertained to the failure of self-control or self-possession and thus the inability to perform the test “at one’s best”, or alternatively, as a deficiency in cognitive skill or ability. In many respects these themes resonate very closely with

89 my analysis of the “language of bias” in Study 1, implicit within which is the notion of a failure of impartiality, of the perils of “feeling too much for one side over another”.

Finally, the IAT’s real-life significance was evocative of, and extrapolated to very specific types of everyday situation—those that were brief, anonymous, chance encounters with racial others in public spaces, most often involving the threat of potential harm or danger.

5 Discussion 5.1 The effectiveness of the IAT

If we consider the IAT as a form of social practice that establishes a particular interpretive context for test-takers, and thereby also “constructs” the user in a particular way—as a particular kind of subject—the above analysis suggests some of the outlines and coordinates of what these are and how this is achieved. It is clear that it is the experience of doing the test itself evokes a familiar culpability; it testifies to and constructs, very strikingly for test-takers, the truth and moral implications of an IAT result. More specifically, it is the moment-by-moment experience of committing unintentional errors—despite efforts to control or avoid them—that vividly demonstrates the evaluative and moral implications to test-takers. Thus, in doing the task, they are enjoined to virtually and simulatively enact their own unthinking failures of judgment, control and response. Although this latter point might seem self-evident to IAT proponents, and has been remarked upon as a particular strength of the test design (see, for example, Dasgupta, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2003), the question remains as to how such a simulative demonstration can provoke the kinds of acute response and offense from test-takers that have been documented here and elsewhere. In this regard, my analysis suggests that the experiential dimensions of the test itself rely on a set of cultural connotations associated with psychological research, and in particular psychological tests. Such connotations provide the scaffolding for a context of moral- psychological evaluation, a set of meanings associated with the purposes of psychological research—to reveal or unearth hidden information—as well as the techniques and “intentions” of psychological research—to purposefully deceive or manipulate research subjects into inadvertently revealing this information themselves. It is these meanings of which our participants showed themselves to be acutely aware, and which accounted for, to a great extent, both their discomfort and docility with respect to the IAT task. It is in this respect that the subject positions associated with “guilt”, “exhortation” and “absolution” identified in Study 1—those in

90 which the moral-psychological truth of the IAT result is assented to—could be argued to be “produced” or constituted by the test procedure itself.

What I am getting at here is that one’s interpellation by the IAT depends to a large extent upon recognizing oneself within its paradigm—that is, it depends upon seeing and accepting oneself as the kind of social agent implied by its universe, its assumed social world and paradigmatic social relation. In this case, our participants articulated this in terms of brief, anonymous, and chance encounters with racial others in public spaces, in which they are arbiters of potential risk or safety. Furthermore, the simulative dimensions of the IAT rely significantly on the ubiquity of computer simulation in popular culture and everyday life. The increasing prevalence of computer simulations in many facets of material culture has meant that to a large extent, we have come to take for granted their “realness” (Turkle, 2009). In the case of the IAT, however, I am not claiming that the test closely resembles “real” prejudice, but that in the absence of a shared and concrete conception of prejudice, what the IAT demonstrates to test-takers is as good as real. In this respect, test and test-taker meet halfway, where the psychological nature of prejudice is defined by the IAT, and the context (or “user-situation”) is easily provided by test-takers.

5.2 The test-savviness of research participants and the IAT as pedagogical tool

The history of the rise of psychological testing in the twentieth century suggests that its widespread acceptance by both psychologists themselves and by the general public depended on the “gradual mass-familiarisation with quasi-scientific phrenological and physiognomical personality analyses since the beginning of the nineteenth century.” (Richards, 2010, p. 42). The same might be said of the now ubiquitous medium for mass psychological testing, the personal computer (even this terminology sounds anachronistic). Thus, it is plausible to argue that no research subject enters a psychological research study completely naively, but that both their consent and successful participation in a research encounter depends on their tacit understanding of and assent to the purposes and methods of psychological science. On this basis, one might conclude that the IAT “works”—for the most part—because of its familiar form; our participants know what computers do and have ideas about how psychological tests work. Additionally, it is the participants themselves who make the inferential leap from the IAT’s sparse design and neutral language to the weighty significance of racism, and from their finger-reflex reaction

91 times, to the moral burden of their own prejudice. The critical question that my analysis begins to shed light on is the extent to which the IAT not only reproduces a familiar paradigm and context of prejudice to which test-takers can relate, but also delivers a pedagogical message about its own operationalization of prejudice through vivid demonstration or enactment. What is produced experientially in the frustrations of performing the associative tasks of the IAT is then confirmed in the delivery of the test result: “Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for White people compared to Black people”. The result is presented alongside a bar chart of the distribution of automatic preference in the population of “web respondents” (see Figure 2 below), and this completes the invitation to the position of “object of science”. This is, of course, a rather familiar position for modern subjects to assume in relation to scientific knowledge, and particularly, psychological knowledge (De Vos, 2010).

Figure 2: Screenshot of IAT result and bar chart comparison

5.3 Reflexive conundrums

In the introduction to this thesis, as well as the current study, I have recounted the numerous ways in which psychological research can often be blind to the social dimensions of its own

92 investigative practices and their nature as social practices per se, with implications for both research participants and for the ways in which the findings of research studies must be interpreted. By the same token, I would be remiss not to reflect on the nature of the social practice constituted by my own study and what this means for the reading of participant experiences of the IAT I have produced here. I introduce these considerations, not as an admission of flawed subjectivity or confession of “bias”, but to extend the sense that can be made of my object of study. The first point concerns the reflexive problem of doing psychological research in order to investigate psychological research, and the second pertains to the nature of the interviews as interactions (e.g., Potter & Hepburn, 2005).

My own interview study of the IAT as a social psychological practice is embedded within the discipline of psychology. To the extent that our participants understood that they were participating in psychological research, it seems reasonable to argue that they would also have been both wary of deception and apprehensive about what might be revealed in the interviews themselves. In analyzing the interview transcripts it seemed apparent that as interviewer I took undue care to relate in as non-judgmental and genuine a way as possible, and in some cases where the participant was obviously uncomfortable, for example, when discussing a result of automatic preference, I did not probe as deeply as I would have liked. Furthermore, at least one participant expressed the expectation that I would reveal the “true” purpose of my research—the interview included—at the end of the research process. There are additional considerations that could have shaped the boundaries of the kinds of response obtained in my interviews: some of the participants had taken introductory psychology and I had identified myself as a graduate psychology student; and one participant thought that the IAT was “my” test. Such status differentials and my association with the IAT may have constrained the kinds of things participants felt it was appropriate to say.

To consider the abovementioned issues is already to begin to view the interviews as interactional, and my interviews—and interviews in general—could be seen to be one of a number of practices of self-accounting. That is, cultural expectations of what is accomplished in social science interviews can to some extent be seen to have shaped participants’ accounts, and many participants gave accounts of their experience as though they were themselves objects of psychological analysis. One particularly telling example comes from a participant who answered some interview questions by saying “I agree, or somewhat agree” (Colin, BM); despite the

93 open-ended nature of my questions, he responded in the language of social science questionnaires. Thus it could be argued that I was unable to realize my intention to understand participants’ experience of being scrutinized by the IAT from a position which did not itself reproduce this sense of psychological scrutiny.

Chapter 4 Discussion and Conclusion

The principal goal of this dissertation has been to critically examine the reflexive implications of the discourse and practices of the Implicit Association Test. My chief concern in this regard has been to ask just how the lay public makes sense of and experiences the test and its claims, and in relation to which cultural and political preoccupations. Specifically, I have been interested in the possible implications of IAT science for the public understanding of prejudice. As I have argued, the test represents more than a simple research tool. Like any other scientific instrument, the IAT has relied—for its emergence and legitimacy—on a network of cultural and institutional meanings and practices, whilst embodying within its design a specific operationalization, and therefore a specific way of problematizing prejudice. My strategy has been to make explicit those social and cultural conditions that give the IAT and its discourse its scientific and social purchase. The objective of the historical and empirical analyses I have presented here has been to elucidate the ways in which prejudice and its subjects are constituted by this discursive practice, and thus to open the way to evaluating its contribution to the broader social justice aims of prejudice reduction, and more generally to the discipline of social psychology and its relation to its public.

In the historical contextualization of the IAT I have presented in the first part of this dissertation, I suggested that implicit social cognition and the notion of implicit bias arose both as a response to changing discourses of racism in North American society, and as a solution to longstanding methodological problems in social psychology associated with a particular kind of social relation between researchers and their subjects. In regard to the former, the IAT intervenes in concerns about the presence of a new kind of subterranean prejudice, lurking just under the surface of a putatively egalitarian American society. In terms of the latter, the IAT offers psychologists the means to circumvent the problems of the recalcitrant research subject, allowing claims to a knowledge that surpasses that of their research subjects themselves. Fervent debate about both of these issues was evident in my study of online discussion in the New York Times, representing a diverse array of responses to both the test itself and to the ways in which its claims to truth and social significance were warranted. The analysis revealed important cultural meanings against which the IAT was interpreted, namely, those of the “objectivity” of psychological science,

liberal or “white guilt”, and the importance of impartiality and self-examination. In debating these themes, readers were positioned in reflexive relationship to psychological knowledge, as rational and objective, or as responsibly self-scrutinizing. This analysis opened up questions on two fronts. Firstly, how was a test of this nature capable of provoking such intense feelings and impassioned responses, even when test-takers were skeptical or critical of it? Secondly, how might the ostensive targets of “implicit bias”, as operationalized in the IAT, namely, “black people” experience and make sense of the test? Both of these questions were tackled in my second study, utilizing a framework for thinking about the IAT as a social practice that establishes a particular interpretive context for test-takers. Through a close reading of accounts of the experience of taking the test, I attempted to make explicit the ways in which the test “constructs its user” and its paradigmatic user situations. My reading of these experiences of the test suggests that it functioned as a dramatization of the implicit bias paradigm, evoking both a sense of ambush and a familiar culpability on the part of the test-taker. Additionally, the surprise and offense experienced by black test-takers, as well as the exemplary (random, public, anonymous) social situations to which the IAT was seen to be relevant, suggested something about the interpretive context that the IAT both draws upon and helps to establish.

In this section I discuss the relevance of the foregoing analyses with respect to two concerns. First, I consider the implications of the IAT for the public understanding of prejudice and its possible repercussions for social policy/action. Here I discuss the ways in which prejudice reduction and anti-racist efforts are helped or hindered by the IAT by considering what is “communicated” by the IAT. More broadly, what do we gain or lose in our conceptions of mental life and social relations by adopting this particular way of understanding prejudice? In doing so, and by way of contrast, I highlight a few alternative formulations of racism that are current in critical psychology and in other disciplines. Second, I reflect on the production of knowledge in social psychology and its relation to its public, and the directions in which the IAT, as one of its “cutting edges,” is pointing. This is followed by a brief reflexive discussion of my own position, and some of its limitations. I conclude by outlining the possibilities for future research that extend from the work I present in this dissertation.

1 The public understanding of prejudice 1.1 The “message” of the IAT

The studies I have presented here demonstrate the extent to which the discursive practices of implicit social cognition—that is, its assumptions, concepts and techniques—do not stand in isolation, but derive their significance and persuasiveness from their resonance with, and reproduction of, specific construals of the nature of prejudice, of the ideal modern psychological subject, and of psychological science. With regard to the nature of prejudice, its operationalization in the Implicit Association Test not only implies but demonstrates directly to test-takers that “bias” or partiality are at the heart of the phenomenon, with the corollary that impartiality or “lack of bias” constitute the desired state of mind. It is this “ethical summoning” or invocation that is, in my view, central to the test’s social and cultural significance. From this flows two injunctions, as I read them, for the “proper” conduct of self. First, an IAT result indicates, points at, a hidden, guilty secret. The test-taker feels urged therefore, upon this revelation, to come clean and confess to this secret as a marker of contrition and a clean conscience. The self-practices recruited here are those of the psychotherapeutic modality: introspection, self-scrutiny, the constitution of a moral self through the act of confession. The context evoked here is of shame and embarrassment – the IAT is experienced as a situation of ambush and exposure. Placed in this context, prejudice is understood experientially as socially unacceptable—as subject to social sanction—rather than intrinsically wrong or morally unacceptable per se. The second injunction is to the scientific gaze. Bias and partiality in this view, are distortions in our view of ourselves and the social world, and these can be overcome by regarding oneself, objectively, as an object of science. We are to become skeptics of our own perceptions and of others’ claims. These discourses conflate moral and psychological ideals such that moral correctness appears predicated on a version of “healthy”, rational subjectivity. The lesson promoted by IAT discourse and the experience of taking the test is thus a psycho-moral one.

1.1.1 Self-work

Taken together, these are instantiations of two facets of the idealized, modern liberal subject. In this view, the ethical goal promoted through the IAT is one of self-knowledge and self-mastery. The problem of prejudice, in this ontology, is a private, rather than public matter, to be dealt with

97 through work on the self; it is a psychological, rather than a shared, collective or political one. The consequences of this “embedded ontology” are anything but unimportant to how we are to make sense of and tackle racism in social life. That the solution to racism lies in greater objectivity in our perception of others and that this can be found through the private act of turning “inward” is one of the more pernicious consequences of the psychologisation of racism. What this means effectively is that critical attention to the social, cultural, political and economic privileges or disadvantages that accrue to members of society as a function of their “race” is diverted towards a focus on individuals’ mental states, and more specifically, their propensities for error, bias or self-deception. In this sense, it can be argued that the IAT and its discourse function ideologically to conceal socio-historically conferred “white privilege”, for although it ostensibly targets “white” or liberal hypocrisy, the latter is defined as one’s unacknowledged thoughts, feelings and associations, rather than a blindness to one’s social-historical position (cf. Vice, 2010)7. The impoverished vision of social reality implicit in the IAT thus does nothing to challenge—and even colludes with—an individualist bias in psychology that obscures the domains of the social and the political as such, and reconfigures these as individual, psychological and private (see Steele & Morawski, 2002).

1.1.2 Scientific experts and the public domain

Moreover, at the heart of IAT discourse is the assumption that conscious thought and talk are fundamentally unreliable, and can be bypassed by increasingly sophisticated technological innovations. Thus, overlaid upon this embedded ontology is the overall technocratic thrust of IAT discourse, which is suspicious of and threatens to subordinate deliberative and negotiative solutions to racism to technical ones. As I have suggested elsewhere in this dissertation, the IAT is recruited into public discussion in just this way: to “cut through” debate and controversy and demonstrate the (experiential) fact of prejudice. Of course, “facts” and evidence produced in psychological science have served—and continue to serve—progressive political purposes precisely through refuting erroneous claims about, for example, race differences in intelligence (see Gould, 1996; Richards, 1997), or the deleterious effects of same-sex family relationships on children (Paige, 2005; Patterson, 2004). The impulse to falsify erroneous claims is not what I am

7 My intention here is not to criticize self-work as such, but only that of a particular psychologized, psycho-moral kind.

98 critical of here, but rather the indiscriminate reliance on technoscientific solutions to social problems. Here, the suspicion of public self-knowledge and open debate implicit in the IAT and its discourse represents a demarcation or cordoning off of boundaries around what the public is qualified to know or say about prejudice, despite assertions that the IAT represents a form of democratization of knowledge, or giving back to “the funding public” (e.g., Nosek et al., 2002).

1.1.3 Psycho-moral parables in social psychology

If one considers the IAT in relation to some of the most well known, “classic” experiments or paradigmatic studies in social psychology, such as those of Asch on conformity (1956), Milgram on obedience (1963), and Latané and Darley on the bystander effect (1969), they are— arguably—remarkably similar in their basic “moral thrust”. Theoretically, the latter studies are regarded as outstanding demonstrations of the power of “situations” to override individual intentions or dispositions (e.g., Blass, 1991). Morally, however, they are cautionary tales, both against the dangers of immersion in social groups or crowds (see, for example, Manning, Levine & Collins, 2007), and—more generally—against assumptions of moral exceptionalism and infallibility. The revelatory and counter-intuitive nature of their findings serves to underline their message: it is not only avowed racists or bigots but “you, too, who are potentially capable/culpable” of error, misjudgment, or cruelty. It is in this respect that the message of the IAT takes on a similar form. Such narratives are, however, double-edged swords: although they remind us of our propensity for error and thus warn against piousness or hubris, they also, paradoxically, lend themselves equally to self-exculpation, or smug, “non-performative” confessions of imperfection.

1.2 Debate in the legal field

Such concerns about the implications of IAT discourse are echoed in responses by legal scholars (e.g., Banks & Ford, 2009) to efforts to promote the IAT and the notion of implicit bias in the legal system (e.g., Greenwald & Krieger, 2006; Kang, 2010; Kang et al., 2012; Lane, Kang, & Banaji, 2007). These promotional efforts in the legal field are perhaps unsurprising given the juridical operationalization of prejudice as bias, as the departure from a neutral, middle position. In the case of Kang et al. (2012), the authors appeal to IAT research to make a case for ostensibly useful changes to juridical procedure that go somewhat beyond the narrow

99 individualization of prejudice, but their overall message remains a psycho-moral one. For example, Most of us would like to be free of biases, attitudes, and stereotypes that lead us to judge individuals based on the social categories they belong to, such as race and gender. But wishing things does not make them so. And the best scientific evidence suggests that we—all of us, no matter how hard we try to be fair and square, no matter how deeply we believe in our own objectivity—have implicit mental associations that will, in some circumstances, alter our behavior (Kang et al., 2012, p. 1186).

These efforts by Kang et al. (2012) and others in the legal literature have not gone unopposed. Critics argue that the appeal of the IAT and its findings can be explained by the false but more palatable consensus about discrimination that the notion of unconscious prejudice provides: since we are all (unconsciously) culpable, there is, paradoxically, no one to blame (Banks & Ford, 2009). They argue, however, that the notion of unconscious bias may “disserve the cause of racial justice … by misdescribing it” (Banks & Ford, 2009, pp. 1058-1059), leading to an undue preoccupation with mental state (whether of juror or judge), a narrow focus on instrumental reasoning and an emphasis on antidiscrimination measures rather than policy reform. IAT proponents often argue that the value of the IAT, at least as a demonstration tool, lies in its provocative nature—but does it provoke the right kind of discussion?

1.3 The IAT and the discourse of “tolerance”

Recent analyses of the discourse of “tolerance” by social and cultural critics provide some interesting parallels with the ways in which the IAT operationalizes prejudice. These critiques take issue with the ease with which “tolerance” is offered up as a solution to social problems such as racism. Brown (2008) and Žižek (2008) argue that the framing of inequalities and political injustices as problems of “intolerance” amounts to a depoliticization of political differences, and a retreat from a positive vision of justice. Žižek (2008) calls this the “culturalization of politics”, or the naturalization of political inequality into “cultural differences”. For both Brown and Žižek, the discourse of intolerance implies the existence of naturally given racial and cultural differences that cannot be overcome, but must simply be tolerated. Similarly, the notion of implicit bias, it could be argued, is analogous to “tolerance” in the sense that it implies the possibility of achieving a disinterested impartiality, a “view from nowhere”. The operationalization of prejudice as bias in IAT discourse could thus be argued to

100 have similar effects, since the problem of racism is not simply one of bias, and its eradication not simply a matter of impartial, objective perception.

2 Alternatives to implicit bias

Some of the most robust responses to the individualizing and depoliticizing effects of psychological conceptualizations of prejudice/racism have been formulated by psychologists who have taken on the challenges of the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences. Although these vary in emphasis and ontology, many of these interpretive and discourse perspectives explicitly oppose the psychological “location” of racism in the heads or mental states of individuals, or in private cognitive operations, and connect the phenomenon to the network of cultural and political norms and rules that govern social life. Analysts in these traditions attempt to show how racism can be performed, or racist ideology reproduced/resisted in everyday social practice, for example, in the public speeches of political leaders (e.g., Capdevila & Callaghan, 2008), mass media representations of immigration (e.g., van Dijk, 2000), or in the spatial arrangement of families relaxing on beaches in post-apartheid South Africa (e.g., Durrheim & Dixon, 2005), and how these racist effects derive from apparently neutral cultural tropes or frameworks for sense- making. These analysts share with traditional social psychologists the concern with “new” racism, but attend to their concrete manifestations in social and political life (Condor, 1988). Such formulations do not do away with the “psychological” altogether, but rely on theories and philosophies that argue that “psychologies” or subjectivities arise through and in relation to widely shared cultural resources (e.g., Wetherell, 2001). Some of these approaches draw from “critical race theory” (see Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) to interrogate the ways in which the invisibility of whiteness and white privilege function in the maintenance of racism (e.g., Adams & Salter, 2011; Kolchin, 2002; Riggs & Augoustinos, 2004, 2005). A further (and again, variable) characteristic of such approaches is their basic reflexive orientation towards their own forms of knowledge and representation. Many evince an effort to articulate the political consequences of their research activity, often through close attention to the rhetorical and discursive effects of their own forms of representation of social life (e.g., Billig, 2001, 2009; Leach, 2005; Riggs & Augoustinos, 2005). Thus, recent reflection on the state of a “critical social psychology of racism” has identified the need for research that disrupts and resists racist ideologies, a psychology of anti-racism (Howarth & Hook, 2005).

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3 Social psychology and its public

By now it is hopefully apparent that the production of “automatic preference” or “implicit prejudice” as psychological objects of significance to the lay public (and arguably to psychologists themselves) is intimately tied up with the demonstration of what these mean through the lived experience of taking the IAT. At the same time, however, the processual and contextual dimensions of taking the test are not represented in the construct of implicit bias at all, which is based solely on data points derived from differential reaction times to different stimuli. As Zabinski (2011) has argued, this transforms an irreducibly processual phenomenon into a static one with a completely different ontological basis, which as we have seen, can in turn change our understanding of ourselves and of the nature of prejudice. In this view, “implicit bias” should be understood not as a reified internal tendency with its concomitant psycho-moral injunctions, but rather as an artifact of its operationalization. This can temper our understanding of its real-world significance and keep us from over-zealous claims about what is actually “found” or revealed by the IAT. This is by no means an argument against its moral-pedagogical uses, but a call to go beyond the immediate seductions of its claims to scientific truth.

There are, additionally, some more wide-ranging implications of the IAT for the discipline of social psychology itself. As a widely disseminated and publically available instance of social psychology, the IAT and implicit prejudice research both have implications for how the discipline is perceived and understood by its publics. In this regard, the broader movement towards “indirect” measures such as the IAT reinforces the fundamentally mistrustful relationship between social psychology and the lay public. As we have seen, those who know something of, and understand, the rationale for “trickiness” or deception in psychological research appear willing to defer in the interests of science, but we should also be less surprised then, when the public responds to psychological research with wariness or suspicion.

The rise of the IAT should, furthermore, be seen in the context of moves both within psychology towards exploratory data mining (see, e.g., American Psychological Association, 2013), and explanations that are grounded in the functions of the brain, as well as broader currents in marketing research (such as neuromarketing) and information technology that eschew understanding in favour of prediction (see Anderson, 2008; Andrejevich, 2010), for the IAT too proposes a “solution” to the opacities and contradictions of subjectivity and promises a direct

102 window to people’s true dispositions. In fact, in many instances the aim of understanding is subordinate to the more instrumentalist goal of accurate prediction of behavior. These trends have led some, like Chris Anderson (2008) the well-known science journalist, to proclaim the “end of theory”, an era in which models or theories of why we do things become irrelevant to predictive, instrumental aims: This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

Anderson’s claims have not gone unanswered (e.g., Pigliucci, 2009), and IAT researchers are by no means uninterested in the ontological status of implicit prejudice or implicit bias. The implicit bias literature is replete with debates over exactly what is being measured by the IAT (Payne & Gawronski, 2010). However, Anderson’s claims serve as a reminder of the potential evolution of the discipline, particularly in a case where the construct itself is unclear and the predictive capacities of the IAT are consequently emphasized (e.g., Blanton et al., 2009; Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009).

3.1 Public ambivalence and psychology’s paradoxical position

Many in social psychology see in the advent of the IAT a great leap forward in its establishment as a truly objective science, enabling the production of knowledge unsullied by the confounds of social desirability, the fallacies of common sense, or the opacities of public self-knowledge. However, as we have seen in people’s encounters with the test, the IAT appears to do little to lessen the skepticism and ambivalence with which people regard the discipline of psychology. As various historians have demonstrated, psychology’s perennial struggle for scientific legitimacy has paradoxically led it further away from its cultural legitimacy, which in large part depends on the groundedness and rootedness of psychological concepts in everyday language and experience (see, for example, Hornstein, 1992 and Richards, 2010). We can thus speculate that psychology occupies a particularly difficult position as a claimant to scientific authority, since its attempts to bolster its relatively fragile scientific status have led to a penchant for knowledge claims that are more than just commonsensical, and for research findings that are in some way non-intuitive or even shocking. Associated with this is a position that is dismissive of

103 cultural common sense, the very grounds from which its own ideas, concepts and priorities spring in the first place. Thus, paradoxically, the more the discipline aspires to a certain form of scientific objectivity, the more alienated from people’s everyday life it becomes. This basic position reinforces, rather than challenges, the deficit model of public understanding of science, underestimating the public’s reflexive capacities and seeing dissent or misgivings about science as signs of dangerous irrationality or obstinate ignorance.

4 Some reflections and limitations

My interest in the psychological-cultural underpinnings and implications of the IAT and implicit social cognition stem from my observations and reflections as a student in a graduate social psychology program. While grappling with my own understanding of the ontological status of psychological objects such as “implicit attitudes” or “hot cognitions” that are current in social psychology, I have been simultaneously fascinated with the extent to which these achieve a psychological reality for researchers and students alike. Therefore, while I have been critical of the significance of these constructs themselves, it seemed to me equally important to understand how these were constitutive or transformative of our social psychological reality regardless of their putative accuracy. That is, I proceeded from the acknowledgment that people are already doing things with the IAT and implicit prejudice. Rather than aiming to deconstruct and reveal the ideological basis of implicit social cognition—that is, as merely fictitious or false—my objective has been to ask how such constructs and their attendant practices effectively invite us to particular forms of moralized and psychologized personhood, and are generative of a particular kind of social psychological reality. This kind of ideological analysis—it is hoped— achieves more than just the “unveiling” of hidden assumptions or cultural bias implicit in ostensibly neutral psychological knowledge (an approach that is characteristic of some forms of analysis in critical psychology) (see Vighi & Feldner, 2007). The readings of public discourse and participant interviews I have produced here have therefore been largely shaped by this intention.

Additionally, the reading I have produced here is situated in a North American context, and should be seen in this light. The reactions provoked by the IAT are likely to be quite different in other contexts, where the relations of race, racism and psychological science are differently configured. Indeed, the IAT demonstration website is accessible to anyone in the world with

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Internet access, is available in 24 languages, and has been taken by significant numbers of people around the world, including my country of origin, South Africa. Studies of public encounters with the IAT in contexts such as these would help to further contextualize the test and its discourse.

5 Future research

The work in this dissertation presents some intriguing possibilities for future investigation. Specifically, it offers an approach to studying scientific practices in social psychology in relation to those whom it studies, and to whom its research is—at least in part—addressed: its research subjects and its public, respectively. In extending this approach there is a great deal of analytic purchase that can be gained by more directly considering the IAT as a form of material culture. The IAT can be considered a “scientific apparatus” or an “epistemic thing”, in the same tradition as brass instruments, visual representations such as diagrams, graphs and images (e.g., Lynch, 1985), statistics (e.g., Tweney, 2003), or block-design tasks in IQ tests. “Epistemic things” are crucial to scientists’ everyday practice and often become invisible once they are established as part of normal paradigmatic research practice. This invisibility obscures the ways in which instruments serve as a means of intervention. According to Tweney (2003), Instruments can ‘stage’ phenomena that are sometimes awkward to observe (cloud chambers, operant chambers), bring untidy phenomena under control (regulated power supplies, memory drums), or even create the phenomena themselves by bringing about events that would not occur except for the actions of the apparatus (cyclotrons, or the many illusions that fill psychological texts) (pp. 125-126, emphasis mine).

The analyses I have presented in this dissertation speak partially but precisely to the ability of the IAT to create the phenomenon of implicit prejudice, and additionally, how its efficacy in this respect inheres in a network of scientific and cultural meanings of psychological testing. A thorough “apparatus analysis” would further illuminate the role and function of the IAT in psychological science by connecting it explicitly to its place in a history of psychological instruments and the culture of testing, its semiotic and social significance in the everyday research practice of psychologists, and its intersections with other technological, pedagogical and social domains and discourses of late modernity (see, for example, Bunn, 2007). Such a study could draw from approaches to “artifact analysis” in social cultural anthropology (e.g., Fleming, 1974) and extend research on scientific instruments in the history and philosophy of psychology

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(e.g., Sturm & Ash, 2005). This focus is crucial, in my view, in light of increasing trends toward the technologization and instrumentalization of social psychological research. These movements demand, not a return to the study of “behaviour”, as some prominent social psychologists have urged (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007), but rather, broader critical thinking about the directions in which the discipline is headed.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: New York Times articles

Kristof, N. D. (October 30, 2008). What? Me Biased? The New York Times, p. A39. For the last year and a half, a team of psychology professors has been conducting remarkable experiments on how Americans view Barack Obama through the prism of race.

The scholars used a common research technique, the Implicit Association Test, to measure whether people regarded Mr. Obama and other candidates as more foreign or more American. They found that research subjects — particularly when primed to think of Mr. Obama as a black candidate — subconsciously considered him less American than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

Indeed, the study found that the research subjects — Californian college students, many of them Democrats supportive of Mr. Obama — unconsciously perceived him as less American even than the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It’s not that any of them actually believed Mr. Obama to be foreign. But the Implicit Association Test measured the way the unconscious mind works, and in following instructions to sort images rapidly, the mind balked at accepting a black candidate as fully American. This result mattered: The more difficulty a person had in classifying Mr. Obama as American, the less likely that person was to support Mr. Obama.

It’s easy to be skeptical of such research, so test for your own unconscious biases at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo or at http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect.

Race is a controversial, emotional subject in America, particularly in the context of this campaign. Many Obama supporters believe that their candidate would be further ahead if it were not for racism, while many McCain supporters resent the insinuations and believe that if Mr. Obama were white, he wouldn’t even be considered for the presidency.

Yet with race an undercurrent in the national debate, that also makes this a teachable moment. Partly that’s because of new findings both in neurology, using brain scans to understand how we respond to people of different races, and social psychology, examining the gulf between our conscious ideals of equality and our unconscious proclivity to discriminate.

Incidentally, such discrimination is not only racial. We also have unconscious biases against the elderly and against women seeking powerful positions — biases that affect the Republican ticket. Some scholars link racial attitudes to a benefit in evolutionary times from an ability to form snap judgments about who is a likely friend and foe. There may have been an evolutionary advantage in recognizing instantaneously whether a stranger was from one’s own tribe or from an enemy tribe. There’s some evidence that the amygdala, a center in the brain for emotions, flashes a threat warning when it perceives people who look “different.”

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Yet our biases are probably largely cultural. One reason to think that is that many African- Americans themselves have an unconscious pro-white bias. All told, considerable evidence suggests that while the vast majority of Americans truly believe in equality and aspire to equal opportunity for all, our minds aren’t as egalitarian as we think they are.

“To me, this study really reveals this gap between our minds and our ideals,” said Thierry Devos, a professor at San Diego State University who conducted the research on Mr. Obama, along with Debbie Ma of the University of Chicago. “Equality is very much linked to ideas of American identity, but it’s hard to live up to these ideas. Even somebody like Barack Obama, who may be about to become president — we have a hard time seeing him as American.”

A flood of recent research has shown that most Americans, including Latinos and Asian- Americans, associate the idea of “American” with white skin. One study found that although people realize that Lucy Liu is American and that Kate Winslet is British, their minds automatically process an Asian face as foreign and a white face as American — hence this title in an academic journal: “Is Kate Winslet More American Than Lucy Liu?”

One might argue that Mr. Obama registers as foreign in our minds because he does have overseas family connections, such as his father’s Kenyan ancestry. But similar experiments have found the same outcome with famous African-American sports figures.

Moreover, Professor Devos found that when participants in the latest study were told to focus on the age of each candidate, or on the political party of each candidate, then Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain were perceived as equally American. It was only when people were prompted to focus on skin color and to see Mr. Obama as black that he was perceived as foreign.

This 2008 election is a milestone and may put a black man in the White House. That creates an opportunity for an adult conversation about the murky complexities of race, in part because there’s evidence that when people become aware of their unconscious biases, they can overcome them.

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Tierney, J. (November 7, 2008). Where Have All the Bigots Gone? The New York Times. Available at http:// tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/where-have-all-the-bigots- gone/. If, as some social scientists have been telling us, 88 percent of whites have an "implicit bias" against blacks and in favor of whites, and if, according to exit polls, whites made up 74 percent of the voters on Tuesday, why is Barack Obama going to be the next president?

I'm afraid I can't make that math work out, so I've got another question: Was this election a landslide defeat for the researchers labeling most Americans as "unconscious" racists? They've done this using tools like the Implicit Association Test, which has shown that whites more quickly associate whites with "good" attributes and and blacks with "bad" attributes."

But do these split-second reaction times really tell us anything useful about how people think and behave? As my colleague Ben Carey points out today, there's also evidence that people's prejudices can be reduced quite quickly when they spend time with someone from another race. And the notion that the computer tests of implicit bias are measuring meaningful prejudice has been disputed in articles like this one in Psychological Inquiry by Hal R. Arkes of Ohio State University and Philip Tetlock of the University of California at Berkeley.

"Obama's candidacy is in itself a major embarrassment for the unconscious-bias crowd," Dr. Tetlock told me. "They've argued that unconscious bias is pervasive but will influence judgments only when people have an ostensibly non-racial rationale to discriminate. Of course, the Clinton and McCain campaigns showered the American public with non-racial rationales to oppose Obama. But people did not seize on these rationales in anywhere near the numbers they should have if unconscious bias were as pervasive and potent as typically implied."

In the exit polls on Tuesday, only 19 percent of voters said that race played a factor in their decision. As my colleagues Kate Zernike and Dalia Sussman note, Mr. Obama's margin of margin of victory was "about the same among voters who said race had been a factor as it was among those who said it had not been at all." Although a majority of white voters supported John McCain, a larger fraction (43 percent) of the white voters voted for Mr. Obama this year than for John Kerry in 2004.

In their Psychological Inquiry article, Dr. Tetlock and Dr. Arkes argue that people's split-second reactions on implicit-bias tests can be explained by factors other than prejudice, and they point to the abundance of survey data showing a decline in racial prejudice in recent decades. They conclude:

If the decades of representative-sample surveys . . . are correct and racism is in steep decline, then hunting for its vestiges using the millisec precision of modern computers appears in a different light: a project that requires attaching increasingly tendentious interpretations to implicit associative measures that are well-suited for answering precisely formulated psychological questions about the working of human memory but that are less suited for tackling political questions about the tenacity of prejudicial behavior.

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Do you agree that these implicit-bias reports are "increasingly tendentious"? Is there any social benefit in using these tests to telling the public that racism is still rampant? After Mr. Obama's victory, should social scientists reconsider their research -- and their image of the bigoted American?

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Tierney, J. (November 18, 2008). A Shocking Test of Bias. The New York Times. Available at http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/a-shocking-test-of-bias/ Are most whites and Asians really unconsciously biased against blacks, as indicated by their scores on the computerized Implicit Association Test (IAT)? My Findings column discusses some criticism of the test, and this week on the blog I'll be quoting more participants in the debate over what the test reveals. You can check out some of their published arguments in the previous post.

It's something of a custom, when discussing the IAT, to disclose your own score on the test along with your unease. "The result always leaves me feeling a bit creepy," Malcolm Gladwell writes in "Blink," explaining that he took the test many times and was told he had "a moderate automatic preference for whites." Two of the pioneering IAT researchers, Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington (who invented the test) and Mahazarin Banaji of Harvard, have both spoken of the their dismay at discovering their own pro-white scores on the test.

""I was deeply embarrassed," Dr. Banaji told the Washington Post. "I was humbled in a way that few experiences in my life have humbled me."

So I was expecting the worst when I took the test last week. I wanted to do well, just as everyone does, but I didn't try any devious strategies, which I'd heard were futile anyway. After I spent a few minutes trying to associate positive and negative words with either blacks or whites, the computer analyzed my reaction times and rendered the verdict: "Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between European American and African American."

Well, this was a different kind of shock. Among test-takers of all races, 70 percent show a preference for whites, and only 17 percent fall into my neutral category. My first impulse was to feel the opposite of embarrassed -- should I be proudly giving lessons in conquering bias to Mr. Gladwell and the IAT pioneers? -- but on reflection I ended up feeling a bit like Mr. Gladwell: creepy. The whole notion of being judged this way seemed weird. Why should you feel either embarrassed or proud when you're not sure what produced your score, how you could improve it or how it affects your behavior?

Did I score better than Mr. Gladwell and the IAT researchers because I had less bias, or because I spent less time than they did worrying about racial discrimination? Some critics of the IAT have suggested that focusing on helping African-Americans could cause you to develop negative associations with blacks simply because you're exposed so often to the problems they face. But that's just one of countless explanations that could be offered for the differences in our scores -- and this multiplicity of unknown factors makes me leery of the test.

You can take the test yourself at the web site of Project Implicit, a collaborative effort of researchers at Harvard, the University of Washington and the University of Virginia. So far it's been taken more than 8 million times. The researchers explain on the site having an unconscious bias is not the same as being consciously prejudiced or endorsing discrimination, but I'm not sure how reassuring the explanation is:

People who hold egalitarian conscious attitudes in the face of automatic White preferences may able to function in non-prejudiced fashion partly by making active

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efforts to prevent their automatic White preference from producing discriminatory behavior. However, when they relax these active efforts, these non-prejudiced people may be likely to show discrimination in thought or behavior.

I'm curious to hear your reports on how you scored on the test and how you felt, as well as your thoughts on what lessons can be learned and how they can -- or can't -- be applied.

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Tierney, J. (November 18, 2008). Further Reading on Unconscious Bias. The New York Times. Available at http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/further-reading-on- unconscious-bias/. Here, for your edification and argument, is a sampling of the scholarly debate described in my Findings column about unconscious bias and its measurement with tools like the Implicit Association Test (IAT):

"Unconscious Racism: A Concept in Pursuit of a Measure." A critique of IAT and unconscious bias theory. H. Blanton, J. Jaccard. (Annual Review of Sociology, 2008.)

"Understanding and Using the Implicit Association Test III." A meta-analysis of more than 100 studies that concludes the IAT has predictive validity. A. G. Greenwald, T. A. Poehlman, E. L. Uhlmann, M. R. Banaji. (In press, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.)

"Ten Frequently Asked Questions about Implicit Measures and Their Frequently Supposed, But Not Entirely Correct Answers." A look at the strengths and weaknesses of the IAT and other implicit measures. B. Gawronski. (In press, Canadian Psychology.)

"Unconscious Prejudice and Accountability Systems: What Must Organizations Do to prevent Discrimination?" A survey of the IAT debate and a proposal for both sides to jointly test their theories in an "adversarial collaboration." P.E. Tetlock, G. Mitchell. (In press, Research in Organizational Behavior.)

"Implicit Association: Validity Debates." A collection of research, compiled by A. Greenwald.

"Strong Claims and Weak Evidence: Reassessing the Predictive Validity of the IAT." H. Blanton, J. Jaccard, J. Klick, B. Mellers, G. Mitchell, P.E. Tetlock. (In press, Journal of Applied Psychology.)

"The "Implicit Association Test at age 7: A methodological and conceptual review." B. Nosek, A.G. Greenwald, M.R. Banaji. (In J. A. Bargh, ed., Automatic processes in social thinking and behavior. Psychology Press. 2007).

"Arbitrary metrics in psychology." H. Blanton, J. Jaccard. (American Psychologist, 2006).

"IAT Studies Showing Validity with 'Real-World' Subject Populations." Collection of 20 reports.

Your comments on either side's research are welcome. And, no, you don't have to read all the papers to weigh in. It's not a required reading list.

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Tierney, J. (November 19, 2008) How Do You Measure Bias? The New York Times. Available at http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/how-do-you-measure-bias/. In my Findings column on the debate over measuring unconscious bias, I didn't have room to get into many details of the debate -- a hugely complicated subject, as evident in just a sampling of the literature. Here's a little more on one of the issues: the general processing speed of the brain and how it affects scores on the computerized Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has been taken by millions of people.

If a young woman takes less time than an older man does to associate a positive word "Joy" with blacks, it might be not because she's less biased but because her brain processes information faster. After being criticized for not adequately correcting for that confounding factor, IAT researchers revised their scoring and classification system in 2003. But two critics, Hart Blanton of Texas A&M and James Jaccard of Florida International University, argue that the adjustments just created new kinds of errors and highlighted the arbitrariness of the ratings.

They write that in 2002, under the old system, 48 percent of the people taking the test were classified as showing a "strong" preference for whites over blacks. Last year, under the new scoring system, only about half as many, 27 percent, fell in that "strong" category. Dr. Blanton and Dr. Jaccard write:

Our goal is not to quibble about what percentage of people are or are not prejudiced. Rather, our goal is to call attention to the casualness with which threshold values have been chosen by researchers faced with an arbitrary metric. Given the societal consequences of the labels and their current uses, there is a need for a more cautious interpretation of IAT scores, at least until empirical research can ground this enterprise.

When I raised these questions to the inventor of the IAT, Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington, he told me that he'd taken past criticism seriously -- that was why the scoring system had been changed. "I'm not clear why they're so put out by a change that reduced the proportion reported as showing strong association," he told me, and added:

There are many other important measures in widespread use for which interpretive criteria change as modification in the measure are made and more is learned about. Consider blood cholesterol scores and the new interpretations that resulted from introduction of separate HDL scoring.

He and another of the leading IAT researchers, Mahazarin Banaji of Harvard, argued that these questions about the metrics of the psychological test were minor compared with the research showing correlations between the scores and other attitudes and behaviors. Dr. Banaji told me:

There are useful points raised by the psychometric challenges and I am certain that refinement of this method and new ones will continue. So let me pose just one question to those who claim that their quarrel with this work is psychometric: If the psychometric problems with the measure are serious, how on earth would we see the length and breadth of predictive and convergent validity we do? Why would a

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psychometrically lame measure predict not only discrimination, but also clinical states like violence, anxiety, depression, and suicide?

The critics argue in response that the test's scores aren't so reliably predictive and that, in any case, it's misleading to use these measures to give labels to people's levels of bias, as is done to the millions of people who have taken the test on the IAT web site. Dr. Jaccard told me:

I find it upsetting that so many people are being told by a Web site maintained by funding from the federal government that they harbor implicit bias against blacks when I know that the test being used to provide this feedback does not meet minimal psychometric standards for providing such feedback.

Your thoughts, biased or otherwise, are welcome.

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Blow, C. M. (February 21, 2009). A Nation of Cowards? The New York Times. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/21/opinion/21blow.html. This began as a relatively quiet Black History Month. The biggest highlight was a 72-year-old former Klansman scratching “apologize to John Lewis for beating him up” off his bucket list. Then came Attorney General Eric Holder’s scathing comments about America being “a nation of cowards” because we don’t have “frank” conversations about race. That got a lot of attention. I take exception to Holder’s language, but not his line of reasoning. Calling people cowards is counterproductive. It turns the conversation into a confrontation — moving it beyond the breach of true dialogue and the pale of real understanding.

That said, frank conversations are always welcomed. But, before we start, it might be helpful to have a better understanding of the breadth and nature of racial bias.

According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last month, twice as many blacks as whites thought racism was a big problem in this country, while twice as many whites as blacks thought that blacks had achieved racial equality.

Furthermore, according to a 2003 Gallup poll, two in five of blacks said that they felt discriminated against at least once a month, and one in five felt discriminated against every day. But, a CNN poll from last January found that 72 percent of whites thought that blacks overestimated the amount of discrimination against them, while 82 percent of blacks thought that whites underestimated the amount of discrimination against blacks.

What explains this wide discrepancy? One factor could be that most whites harbor a hidden racial bias that many are unaware of and don’t consciously agree with. Project Implicit, a virtual laboratory maintained by Harvard, the University of Washington and the University of Virginia, has administered hundreds of thousands of online tests designed to detect hidden racial biases. In tests taken from 2000 to 2006, they found that threequarters of whites have an implicit pro- white/anti-black bias. (Blacks showed racial biases, too, but unlike whites, they split about evenly between pro-black and pro-white. And, blacks were the most likely of all races to exhibit no bias at all.) In addition, a 2006 study by Harvard researchers published in the journal Psychological Science used these tests to show how this implicit bias is present in white children as young as 6 years old, and how it stays constant into adulthood.

(You can take the test yourself.)

So why do so many people have this anti-black bias?

I called Brian Nosek, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Virginia and the director of Project Implicit, to find out. According to him, our brains automatically make associations based on our experiences and the information we receive, whether we consciously agree with those associations or not. He said that many egalitarian test-takers were shown to have an implicit anti-black bias, much to their chagrin. Professor Nosek took the test himself, and even he showed a pro-white/anti-black bias. Basically, our brains have a mind of their own.

This bias can seep into our everyday lives in insidious ways. For example, a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in October found that many white

140 doctors also had an implicit pro-white/anti-black bias, while black doctors showed almost no bias for one race or the other. The paper suggested that these biases may contribute to the unequal treatment of blacks, and that doctors may not even be conscious of it.

Can we eradicate this implicit bias? Maybe. According to a Brown University and University of Victoria study that was published last month in the online journal PLoS One, researchers were able to ameliorate white’s racial biases by teaching them to distinguish black peoples’ faces from one another. Basically, seeing black people as individuals diminished white peoples’ discrimination. Imagine that.

Now that we know this, are we ready to talk? Maybe not yet. Talking frankly about race is still hard because it’s confusing and uncomfortable.

First, white people don’t want to be labeled as prejudiced, so they work hard around blacks not to appear so. A study conducted by researchers at Tufts University and Harvard Business School and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that many whites — including those as young as 10 years old — are so worried about appearing prejudiced that they act colorblind around blacks, avoiding “talking about race, or even acknowledging racial difference,” even when race is germane. Interestingly, blacks thought that whites who did this were more prejudiced than those who didn’t.

Second, that work is exhausting. A 2007 study by researchers at Northwestern and Princeton that was published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science found that interracial interactions leave whites both “cognitively and emotionally” drained because they are trying not to be perceived as prejudiced.

The fear of offending isn’t necessarily cowardice, nor is a failure to acknowledge a bias that you don’t know that you have, but they are impediments. We have to forget about who’s a coward and who’s brave, about who feels offended and who gets blamed. Let’s focus on the facts, and let’s just talk.

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Levitt, S. D. (June 1, 2010). The Visible Hand. The New York Times. Available at http://www.freakonomics.com/2010/06/01/the-visible-hand/. Let’s say you were in the market for an iPod and wanted to find a bargain, so you searched in a local online market like Craigslist to find one. Would it matter to you whether, in the photograph of the unopened iPod, the person holding the iPod (all you can see is their hand and wrist) was black or white? What if the hand holding the iPod had a visible tattoo?

I suspect that most people would say that the skin color of the iPod holder wouldn’t matter to them. More people likely would say the tattoo might keep them from responding to the ad.

Economists have never liked to rely on what people say, however. We believe that actions speak louder than words. And actions certainly do speak loudly in some new research carried out by economists Jennifer Doleac and Luke Stein. Over the course of a year, they placed hundreds of ads in local online markets, randomly altering whether the hand holding an iPod for sale was black, white, or white with a big tattoo. Here is what they found:

Black sellers do worse than white sellers on a variety of market outcome measures: they receive 13% fewer responses and 17% fewer offers.

These effects are strongest in the Northeast, and are similar in magnitude to those associated with the display of a wrist tattoo. Conditional on receiving at least one offer, black sellers also receive 2–4% lower offers, despite the self-selected—and presumably less biased—pool of buyers. In addition, buyers corresponding with black sellers exhibit lower trust: they are 17% less likely to include their name in e-mails, 44% less likely to accept delivery by mail, and 56% more likely to express concern about making a long-distance payment. We find evidence that black sellers suffer particularly poor outcomes in thin markets; it appears that discrimination may not “survive” in the presence of significant competition among buyers. Furthermore, black sellers do worst in the most racially isolated markets and markets with high property crime rates, suggesting a role for statistical discrimination in explaining the disparity.

So what can you conclude from this study? The clearest result is that if you want to sell something online, whether you are black or white, find someone white to put in the picture. I suppose you could say that advertisers figured this out long ago, and actually go one step further, making sure the white person is also a good looking blond woman.

It is much harder, in this sort of setting, to figure out why buyers treat black and white sellers differently. As the authors note, there are two leading theories of discrimination: animus and statistical discrimination. By animus, economists mean that buyers don’t want to buy from a black seller, even if the outcome of the transaction will be identical. Buyers wouldn’t like black sellers, even if black sellers provided exactly the same quality as white sellers. With statistical discrimination, on the other hand, the black hand is serving as a proxy for some sort of negative: a higher likelihood of being ripped off, a good more likely to have been stolen, or maybe a seller who lives very far away so that it will be too much trouble to meet in person to do the deal.

The most impressive part of this paper by Doleac and Stein is their attempt to distinguish between these two competing explanations: animus versus statistical discrimination. How do they do it? One thing they do is to vary the quality of the advertisement. If the ad is really high

142 quality, the authors conjecture, maybe that provides a signal that could trump the statistical discrimination motive for not buying from the black seller. It turns out that ad quality does not matter much for the racial outcomes, but possibly this is because the quality difference across the ads isn’t great enough to matter. The authors also explore the impact of living in an area with more or less concentrated markets, and also across places with high and low property crime. Black sellers do especially bad in high crime cities, which the authors interpret as evidence that it is statistical discrimination at work.

I really like this research a lot. It is an example of what economists call a “natural field experiment,” which has the best of what lab experiments have to offer (true randomization) but with the realism that comes from observing people in actual markets, and with the research subjects unaware they are being analyzed.

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Appendix 2: List of categories and sub-codes from coding of NYTimes data

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Appendix 3: Key to abbreviations of article names (alphabetical)

FRB: Further reading on unconscious bias

HMB: How do you measure bias?

NOC: A nation of cowards

STB: A shocking test of bias

TVH: The visible hand

WBG: Where have all the bigots gone?

WMB: What? Me biased?

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Appendix 4: Information and consent form You are invited to participate in a study of people’s experience and interpretation of a psychological test of automatic processes. We would like you to understand that your participation in this study is completely voluntary and that you may withdraw now, or at any time. Your decision not to participate will in no way prejudice your relations with the Department of Psychology or the University of Toronto and your withdrawal will not result in any penalty, academic or otherwise.

In today’s session, you will be asked to complete a short online psychological test known as the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The test will require you to complete some matching tasks as quickly as possible, and should take you no longer than 10 minutes. Though it is unlikely that you would experience any level of discomfort with taking the test, should you be uncomfortable with proceeding, you are free to discontinue the test at any time.

Once you have completed the IAT, you will take part in a short interview. In the interview, you will be asked questions about your experience of taking the test, your thoughts and feelings after taking it, and what your understanding is of the result and the test itself. There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers to these questions; we are simply interested in your personal views. You will also be asked to complete a brief questionnaire that includes standard questions about your personal and family background, circumstances, and history. None of the questions you will be asked are likely to make you uncomfortable. Nevertheless, if you encounter any questions that you are not entirely comfortable with, you are free to choose to not answer them. Also, if for some reason you prefer your responses not to be recorded or used in our research, you may ask the interviewer to turn off the recording device at any time.

We would like to emphasize that none of the responses you provide today will be viewed by anyone other than the researchers directly responsible for this study. They will not be shared with anyone else, including other members of the department or university. Should any of your responses appear as examples or illustrations in scientific presentations or published reports, they will be carefully stripped of any personally identifying information. Thus, you have our assurance of the complete anonymity of what you tell us today. All research files will be stored securely in our laboratory, and will be kept for 6 months after the completion of the study, after which they will be securely deleted/destroyed.

Today’s session will not exceed 60 minutes. After the interview and questionnaire are completed, the nature and purpose of the study will be explained to you. You will then have the opportunity to ask any questions or express any concerns you might have.

If you have any questions or concerns at this time, please direct them to the administrator now. If, at any time after today’s session, you have questions about your rights as a research participant, please contact the Ethics Review Office by phone at 416-946-3273 or by email at [email protected].

The primary investigator responsible for this study is Jeffery Yen, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology. If you wish to contact him in the future about this study, he can be reached at 416-946-5275 or at [email protected]. His faculty supervisor on this project is Dr. Romin Tafarodi. He can be reached at 416-946-3024 or at [email protected].

We will provide you with a copy of this consent form for future reference. ------Your signature below indicates that you have read the above information and decided to participate. Your signature does not constitute a waiver of any legal rights. You may withdraw at any time after signing this form, should you choose to discontinue participation in the study.

Name (please print clearly) Date

Signature Student Number

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Appendix 5: Interview schedule

Interview domains (probing questions in italics)

A. Overall experience and meaning of the test

1. Can you describe to me in detail your overall experience of doing the test? a. “Walk me through” the experience from start to finish. b. How did doing this test make you feel? c. What thoughts did you have while doing the test? d. What were your thoughts and feelings before, during and after taking the test? e. What were you expecting the test to be like? 2. How do you make sense of the test? a. What do you think its purpose is? b. What information do you think it was able to obtain from you?

B. Test result

3. What do you think of the result you obtained on the test? a. Please share your IAT test result. b. Do you agree with the result? Why or why not? c. How accurately do you think it reflects your feelings or thoughts? d. Do you think it says anything about you? Why or why not? e. How do you explain your test result? f. Does the test say something about your life/experience outside of this lab? g. If this did say something about you, can you remember/imagine a situation in which your result would play out, and could you describe it?

C. Self-knowledge and the unconscious

4. How well do you think you know yourself? a. How aware of your own attitudes and feelings do you think you are? b. Does doing this test cast any doubt on that? Why or why not?

D. Impact

5. Do you think you will reflect on this experience at a later point? If so, in what way? 6. Do you think that you might interact differently with people after this test? How so? 7. Would you recommend this test to your friends, family or other people you know? Why or why not? 8. Do you think the test helps us to better understand racial prejudice? Why or why not? 9. Do you think this is an important research method? Why or why not?

E. Prejudice

10. Where does prejudice come from? 11. How should prejudice be dealt with in society?

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Appendix 6: Demographic questionnaire Please answer the following questions as honestly and accurately as possible. Respond to the statements in the order they appear. For questions you find difficult to answer, just provide your best guess.

1. What is your program of study? ______

2. What is your year of study in this program? ______

3. What subject(s) are you majoring in? ______

4. What is your age? ______years ______months

5. What is your gender? _____female ______male

6. In what country were you born? ______

7. In what city are you presently living? ______

8. How long have you lived in this city? _____ years and _____ months

9. How long have you lived in Canada? _____ years and _____ months

10. In what country was your mother born? ______

11. In what country does she live now? ______

12. In what country was your father born? ______

13. In what country does he live now? ______

14. With which ethnic group(s) do you most strongly identify yourself? (Feel free to be as specific as you wish.) ______

15. With which ethnic group(s) does your mother most strongly identify herself? (Feel free to be as specific as you wish.) ______

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16. With which ethnic group(s) does your father most strongly identify himself? (Feel free to be as specific as you wish.) ______

17. What is your mother’s occupation? ______

18. What is your father’s occupation? ______

19. Please indicate your mother’s highest level of education. Be sure to check only one box.

□ elementary school □ junior high school □ some high school □ graduated from high school □ some college □ graduated from college □ some university □ graduated from university □ some advanced university (professional or graduate school) □ graduated with advanced university degree (professional or graduate school)

20. Please indicate your father’s highest level of education. Be sure to check only one box.