The Great Implicit Bias Bamboozle

Where were you when you first learned about implicit bias?

Maybe you were on your couch at home watching one of the 2016 US Presidential Debates when Hilary Clinton discussed implicit bias in her debate with Donald Trump. For many psychologists like me, we’d been hearing about implicit bias—and were sick of hearing about implicit bias—for nearly two decades by then.

I can remember precisely where I was when I learned about the measurement of these supposedly hidden prejudices. I was a PhD student at Brown University in 1998 (back when Hilary’s husband was President) sitting in my advisor’s office when she had me complete an implicit association test (IAT) on the computer. The test consisted of pictures of Black and white faces and positive and negative words, and my job was to sort out the faces by race and the words by emotional valence. What became quickly apparent to me was that I had a much tougher time pairing Black faces with positive words than Black faces with negative words. An…