BazermanMoore

128 Chapter 7: Fairness and Ethics in Decision Making
the Implicit Associations Test, or IAT (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). The
IAT is one of the most interesting and controversial psychological tests ever developed
because it offers the potential to assess attitudes that most people would rather not
reveal. Unlike with most psychological testing tools, it is very difficult to consciously
manipulate one’s IAT scores. So what can the IAT reveal? It cannot reveal whether or
not someone is racist, sexist, and so on. Rather, the IAT measures the strength of an
individual’s implicit association between two pairs of categories, such as White/Black
and Good/Bad.
The IAT, which is usually administered via computer, works as follows. The testtaker
is instructed to categorize items that appear on the screen as quickly as possible
by striking keys on the keyboard. The items that appear on the screen might come from
one of four categories, such as ‘‘White,’’ ‘‘Black,’’ ‘‘Good,’’ and ‘‘Bad.’’ If you were shown
a series of pictures of people’s faces, you might be asked to press one key to indicate
that the face belongs to a ‘‘Black’’ person and to press a different key to indicate that
the face belongs to a ‘‘White’’ person. You would also be shown words such as ‘‘Hate,’’
‘‘Love,’’ ‘‘Kill,’’ and ‘‘Heal,’’ which you would have to categorize by pressing the key for
‘‘Good’’ or the key for ‘‘Bad.’’
The typical test includes a series of rounds. In some rounds, ‘‘White’’ faces and
‘‘Bad’’ words belong to the same category and should be categorized using the same
key; meanwhile, ‘‘Black’’ faces and ‘‘Good’’ words belong to the same category and
should be categorized using the same key. In other rounds, ‘‘White’’ faces will belong
with ‘‘Good’’ words and ‘‘Black’’ faces with ‘‘Bad’’ words.
Research using the IAT to study stereotyping and prejudice has produced some
interesting results. Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002) report that roughly threequarters
of the white Americans who visit their Web site (http://implicit.harvard.edu)
exhibit implicit pro-white attitudes. (If you are wondering about your own implicit attitudes,
you can take the IAT yourself by visiting the IAT Web site.) On average, both
white and black Americans perform the test more quickly and accurately when they
must associate ‘‘White’’ with ‘‘Good’’ and ‘‘Black’’ with ‘‘Bad’’ than when they must associate
‘‘White’’ with ‘‘Bad’’ and ‘‘Black’’ with ‘‘Good.’’ These results imply that most of
us have deeply ingrained, if unconscious, associations that lead us to favor whiteness
over blackness when it comes to race.
Many people are surprised to discover how little control they have over the expression
of implicit attitudes regarding race, gender, age, and so on (Banaji, Bazerman, &
Chugh, 2003). Because implicit attitudes are rooted in the ordinary mental processes of
categorization, perception, memory, and judgment, Banaji (2001) has called the use of
these attitudes ‘‘ordinary prejudice.’’ She argues further that the word ‘‘ordinary’’ captures
the likelihood that, if ordinary mental processes are involved in expressions of
stereotypes and prejudice, then ordinary managers, executives, and other professionals
will demonstrate them.
Blanton and Jaccard (2006) advise IAT test-takers to keep several factors in mind
when interpreting their scores. Most importantly, the IAT reveals the relative strength
of implicit attitudes but not their absolute strength. In other words, if the test reveals
that you associate goodness more with white faces than with black faces, that does not
necessarily mean that, on a subconscious level, you love white people and hate black