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By coincidence, I had just read a lengthy, detailed and quite damning indictment of the IAT by scrupulously thorough investigative reporter Jesse Singal of New York Magazine’s Science of Us. I hope the honchos at the CBC will read it as well.

The IAT is a word association game that reveals an individual’s bias and can supposedly predict racist action. Researchers Mahzarin Banaji, currently chair of Harvard University’s psychology department, and Anthony Greenwald, a social psychology academic at the University of Washington, introduced the test at a 1998 Seattle press conference, claiming their data suggested 90-95 per cent of Americans harboured the “roots of unconscious prejudice.”

Anyone can take the test on the Project Implicit Website, hosted by Harvard U. By October 2015, more than 17 million individuals had completed it (with presumably 90-95 per cent of them then self-identifying as racist). Liberal observers love the IAT. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in 2015, “It’s sobering to discover that whatever you believe intellectually, you’re biased about race, gender, age or disability.” Kristof’s tone is more complacent than sober, though. For progressives, the more widespread bias can be demonstrated to be, the more justifiable institutional and state intrusions into people’s minds become.

Banaji and Greenwald have themselves made far-reaching claims for the test: the “automatic White preference expressed on the Race IAT is now established as signaling discriminatory behavior. It predicts discriminatory behavior even among research participants who earnestly (and, we believe, honestly) espouse egalitarian beliefs. …. Among research participants who describe themselves as racially egalitarian, the Race IAT has been shown, reliably and repeatedly, to predict discriminatory behavior that was observed in the research.”