Screen Test - Why we should start measuring bias. By Jay Dixit

Screen Test - Why we should start measuring bias. By Jay Dixit: "'Everyone's a little bit racist sometimes,' proclaims the Broadway musical Avenue Q. 'Doesn't mean we go/ Around committing hate crimes/ Look around and you will find/ No one's really colorblind/ Maybe it's a fact/ We all should face/ Everyone makes judgments/ Based on race.'

How do you test internal bias? You can try asking people, but since most of us don't like to think of ourselves as biased, we won't necessarily admit to it on a questionnaire, even anonymously. But there's a test to detect the kind of bias people won't admit to and may not even be aware of themselves—a test that works. The psychologists who devised it, however, are squeamish about real-world uses of it. They shouldn't be. Though it shouldn't be used as the basis for hiring decisions, the test has its place.

In 2003, Mahzarin Banaji, Anthony G. Greenwald, and Brian Nosek published a paper detailing an experimental methodology they had developed called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT. Rather than asking subjects what they thought about different races (or what they thought they thought), Banaji and her colleagues decided to time them as they paired words and images."

In the test's most popular version, the Race IAT, subjects are shown a computer screen and asked to match positive words (love, wonderful, peace) or negative words (evil, horrible, failure) with faces of African-Americans or whites. Their responses are timed. If you tend to associate African-Americans with "bad" concepts, it will take you longer to group black faces with "good" concepts because you perceive them as incompatible. If you're consistently quicker at connecting positive words with whites and slower at connecting positive words with blacks—or quicker at connecting negative words with blacks and slower at connecting negative words with whites—you have an implicit bias for white faces over those of African-Americans. In other words, the time it takes you to pair the faces and words yields an empirical measure of your attitudes. (Click here for a more detailed description of the test.)

The elegance of Banaji's test is that it doesn't let you lie. What's being measured is merely the speed of each response. You might hate the idea of having a bias against African-Americans, but if it takes you significantly longer to group black faces with good concepts, there's no way you can hide it. You can't pretend to connect words and images faster any more than a sprinter can pretend to run faster. And you won't significantly change your score if you deliberately try to slow down your white = good and black = bad pairings.