That Old Unconscious, Lyin' Again

Away from Nervewracker for a little while, and looking for a chance to rev up and return when nothing less than a New York Times op-ed arrives to fortuitously bonk me over the head with a subject. In this column Nicholas Kristol, a writer I like, turns to a couple of researchers who looked at reactions to the Obama candidacy based on a test of "implicit associations." And it turns out, according to the researchers that college students are less likely to see a black candidate as "American." Subconsciously, that is.

You can take the kind of implicit association test this is based on here. I've taken it before, and just took it again now. And in my experience, the results are plain nonsense. And the problem here is that it is insidious nonsense, because as a test of unconscious biases any objection can be answered with, "Oh, but you're just in denial," or some more technical sounding version of that. Better to just say nothing, because if the test shows you have an unconscious bias that you don't think you have, you're a two time loser, a bigot who just can't accept it.

Well, let me tell you my results over several tests. When I first tried a series of these tests a couple of years ago, I showed an unconscious association of blacks with guns and violence (the assumption of the test, by the way, seemed to be that guns have negative associations--though frankly, for me I'm not really sure they do). I also, according to more tests, believe that women are better at math and science than men. Have no preference for thin people over fat people. And, according to the test I took now, have a slight preference for gay people over straight ones. All this basically makes me say, "Huh?" Really? Well, okay, maybe I'm an unconscious bigot. And ... gosh ... could I be gay and not know it? But what am I supposed to make of the idea that I think women are better at math and science? No amount of introspection lets me make sense of this. I really have no idea either way, though when I was younger I knew a number of folks with a truly spectacular talent for math--all, as it happens, men.

The dumbest part here, though, is the test of attitudes about people who are overweight. Because here I think I'm pretty in touch with my automatic impulses, and (unfortunately) they're not what the test shows at all. My ex-wife once told me that when she wanted me to dislike someone, she took care to drop in that he was fat. This is a stupid prejudice, that I'm not proud of. But it's one that I have trouble shaking. And this test utterly misses it. The bottom line is that I see no more reason to beat myself up over a supposed fear of blacks than I do to pat myself on the back about my inclusive attitudes about women in science or my comfort with different body types. I have no doubt that prejudices exist. But as a journalist I can tell you that it's easy enough to make them come out just by asking.

What I find distasteful about the test is that it is ultimately a bizarre inversion of the great Freudian project of self-understanding. For all the problems with Freudian analysis, the basic principle that our inner thoughts are something worth bringing out and examining is a worthwhile one. At its root, the Freudian project assumed that we have thoughts that we don't want to admit, and this accords with all of our experience. The premise of the implicit association test, on the other hand, is that our thinking is just not subject to introspection or examination, and can be brought out only by measuring the speed with which we press a sequence of keys. This would be a depressing idea if it could be proved true. It is an insidious and scary one when presented in a way designed to make sure that it can't even be proved false.