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On Tuesday, more than 8,000 Starbucks locations across the U.S. closed their doors for an afternoon of racial sensitivity training. As the company has indicated in interviews, the training will include “critical” instruction on the problem of “unconscious” bias.

Like countless other corporate seminars on unconscious bias, Starbucks’ is likely to rely heavily on the “implicit association test,” a psychological measure purporting to reveal hidden bias within a person’s subconscious.

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There’s just one problem: The test is seriously flawed and may not predict racist behaviour.

Below, a quick guide to why the “implicit association test” (IAT) might be misleading millions.

This test is used absolutely everywhere

The race version of the implicit association test is a simple computer test that asks users to sort faces by black and white. Then, it asks users to sort those faces simultaneously with a number of words: white faces and “good” words (glorious, peace, etc.) go in one category, while black faces and “bad” words (failure, awful, etc.) go in the other category. Finally, the word categories are switched, and users must pair “bad” words with white, and “good” words with black. A complex algorithm undergirds the test, but essentially, if a user takes longer to associate “good” words with black faces than with white, the test is going to diagnose them as having an “automatic preference for white people compared to black people.” Invented in the late 1990s at the University of Washington, the test has now utterly permeated how American society views racism. Universities, governments and corporations have adopted the test as a keystone of racial sensitivity training. Statisticians are using the test to measure the relative racism of American demographic groups. Former democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton endorsed implicit bias testing in an election speech, linking implicit bias to police shootings of black men. The test’s creators have called for it to be a mandatory component of jury selection. A version of the IAT has even been put forward as a foolproof lie detector test. In short, it’s kind of important that there’s a bunch of people accusing the test of being extremely flawed.