Completing a Race Test Increases Implicit Racial Bias: By measuring, we often perturb the system that we wish to understand

Hussey, Ian, and Jan De Houwer. 2018. “Completing a Race IAT Increases Implicit Racial Bias.” PsyArXiv. November 19. doi:10.31234/osf.io/vxsj7

Abstract: The Implicit Association Test has been used in online studies to assess implicit racial attitudes in over seven million participants. Although typically used as an assessment measure, results from four pre-registered experiments (N = 940) demonstrated that completing a Race IAT exacerbates the negative implicit attitudes that it seeks to assess. Increases in White participants’ negative automatic racial evaluations of Black people were observed across two different implicit measures (SC-IAT and AMP) but did not generalize to another measure of automatic racial bias (Shooter Bias task). Results highlight an important caveat for the Race IAT, but also for many other forms of psychological assessment: that by measuring, we often perturb the system that we wish to understand.