The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal

Author:Jesse Singal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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BUT EVER SINCE THE IAT first caught on, there have been skeptics. While most of academic psychology and mainstream journalism accepted the IAT and its ramifications at more or less face value, those skeptics refused to do so. What ensued was an important academic battle that seriously dented, if not shattered entirely, the IAT’s most important claims.

This battle was fought most fiercely, albeit not exclusively, between a core set of IAT proponents and a core set of critics. The proponents included Banaji and Greenwald, the creators of the test, as well as John Jost of New York University and Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia (who has also carved out his own niche as a leading advocate for reforming psychological science through study replications and other reforms, and who, as we will see, also co-authored an important meta-analysis calling the IAT’s utility into question). The critics included the influential Wharton School professor Philip Tetlock, who’s perhaps best known for studying why some people are better at making predictions than others, Hart Blanton of Texas A&M (a psychology methods expert), Gregory Mitchell of the University of Virginia School of Law, Fred Oswald of Rice University, Hal Arkes of Ohio State University, and James Jaccard of NYU.

It might be worth taking a step back here. How does one even measure whether a test like the IAT works as advertised? Psychometrics, or the branch of psychology concerned with creating and evaluating psychological instruments measuring anxiety, depression, implicit bias, or whatever else, offers basic guidelines, and they involve statistical benchmarks measuring how good a given instrument is. The two most important such benchmarks measure a test’s reliability—that is, its level of measurement error (every test has some)—and its validity, or the extent to which it is measuring what it claims to be measuring. A good instrument needs to score solidly in both departments to be accepted by the psychological community.

Part of the critics’ argument was that the IAT has serious issues on both fronts. Take the concept of test-retest reliability, which measures the extent to which a given instrument will produce similar results if you take it, wait a bit, and then take it again. This is one of the first things a psychologist will look at when deciding whether to use a given tool. If a depression test tells people they’re severely depressed and at risk of suicidal ideation at noon, but free from all depressive symptoms a couple hours later, that’s not a useful test. Test-retest reliability is expressed with a variable known as r, which ranges from 0 to 1. To gloss over some of the statistical details, r = 1 means that if a given test is administered multiple times to the same group of people, it will rank them in exactly the same order every time. At the other end of the spectrum, when r = 0, the ranking shifts every time the test is administered, completely at random. Overall, the closer you get to r

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