The Creator ot IAT is against Mandatory Implicit Bias Training

Implicit Bias, the Implicit Bias Test, and Implicit Bias Training have all been in the news lately, especially after Starbucks announced that it was going to shut down 8,000 stores to do Implicit Bias Training with their employees.

So I was intrigued to discover a letter written by one of the creators of the Implicit Bias Test.

Her point of view is interesting. Unlike skeptics like Lee Jussim and Jesse Singal, she certainly believe that the Implicit Bias Test measures... implicit bias, but she's quite against mandatory training. She cites work by others that show how mandatory training makes things worse, not better.

Yet laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out. As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.

The whole letter is a great read, and she also links to Outsmarting Human Minds, an education resource I look forward to using