Implicit Association Test - Criticism and Controversy

Criticism and Controversy

The IAT has engendered some controversy in both the scientific literature and in the public sphere (e.g., in the Wall Street Journal.) For example, it has been interpreted as assessing familiarity, perceptual salience asymmetries, or mere cultural knowledge irrespective of personal endorsement of that knowledge. A more recent critique argued that there is a lack of empirical research justifying the diagnostic statements that are given to the lay public. For instance, feedback may report that someone has a automatic preference for . Proponents of the IAT have responded to these charges, but the debate continues. According to The New York Times, "there isn’t even that much consistency in the same person’s scores if the test is taken again". In addition, researchers have recently claimed that results of the IAT might be biased by the participant's lacking cognitive capability to adjust to switching categories, thus biasing results in favor of the first category pairing (e.g., pairing "Asian" with positive stimuli first, instead of pairing "Asian" with negative stimuli first).

Some of these issues have been settled in the research literature, but others continue to inspire debate among researchers and lay people alike.