The final nail in the coffin for the failed science of "implicit bias"?

Philosopher Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh), a leading contributor to philosophy of cognitive science, shared with me his latest analysis of the empirical literature.  (Professor Machery also was kind of enough to allow me to post the penultimate draft of the typescript:   Download Machery Anomalies in Implicit Attitudes Research copy.)

As Professor Machery summarizes the research:

Since the 1990s, social psychologists have developed several unobtrusive or indirect measures of attitudes, the most famous of which is the Implicit Association Test. Psychologists, and following them philosophers and policy makers, often take these measures to tap into a new kind of attitudes, distinct from the attitudes that older direct measures assess: implicit attitudes. Implicit attitudes have been blamed for many of the enduring social ills, and they justify costly training programs in the corporate world, universities, and police departments.

In recent years, however, there have been increasing concerns about the quality of indirect measurements. This article reviews the most important issues related to that question:

• There is little evidence that direct and indirect measures measure distinct things.
• Indirect measures are unreliable: Your score today does not predict well your score tomorrow.
• Indirect measures predict behavior poorly.
• There is no causal evidence that whatever it is indirect measures tap into affects behavior.

These issues have been around for now decades, but they have barely been addressed despite their basic nature. But then why do so many believe in implicit attitudes at all, as a sui generis kind of attitudes?

In academic philosophy, as I've said many times before, I suspect the primary obstacles to women have not been "implicit" biases but explicit biases, including the tendency of far too many socially maladjusted academic men to view female graduate students not as professionals in training but as potential sexual and romantic opportunities.  (Perhaps my perception of the problem is colored by having worked with a number of women over the years who were victims of various kinds of sexual harassment.)

Regardless, it is surely past time to acknowledge that the "science" of implicit bias is mostly garbage.