“Mitchell & Tetlock (2017). Popularity as a poor proxy for utility.” - Article summary

Before the existence of the IAT, indirect measures of prejudice were developed in order to overcome response bias and psychologists began to examine automatic processes that may contribute to contemporary forms of prejudice. After the existence of the IAT, implicit prejudice became the same thing as widespread unconscious prejudices that are more difficult to spot and regularly infect intergroup interactions.

The IAT has been used throughout different areas of society and is a very popular mean of describing implicit prejudice. Prejudice extends beyond negative or positive associations with an attitude object to include motivational and affective reactions to in-group and out-group members. IAT does not have a strong predictive validity. The IAT score is a poor predictor of discriminating behaviour.

There are no guidelines for how to interpret the scores on the IAT. This is referred to as the score interpretation problem. The test scores are dependent on arbitrary thresholds and it is not possible to link them to behaviour outcomes.

The focus of the IAT on implicit gender stereotypes is (not implicit sexism) is problematic because implicit measures of gender stereotypes are not a good predictor of discriminatory behaviour (1), only a very limited set of implicit gender stereotypes has been examined (2) and no explanation is provided about how conflicts between automatic evaluative associations and automatic semantic associations are resolved (3).

Individuating information, getting personal information about a certain group, exerts effects to counter explicit biases. It does the same with regard to implicit biases.

Subjective evaluation criteria are not associated with discrimination. Therefore, the solution that only objective measures must be used in decision making to counter (implicit) bias is unnecessary. This is referred to as the subjective judgement problem.