Implicit Bias and You. And Me. And Everyone..

[The Grand Nudger]

You could just check the wiki page for the test type to figure out all of the criticisms such a test, even in a better form, is subject to.  The point about mario brothers is that an input reversal and prompting is one of the ways that video game designers have made their games "difficult".  Getting you to press the "wrong" button at a familiar prompt (say you meant to hit I because you were thinking bad but because e was the previous "bad" button you hit that instead).  Some amount of my getting answers "right", particularly after reversals, comes down to how familiar I am with that mechanic, which is present both in the test and in just about -any- video game. Some amount of my getting answers "wrong" is motor control. It's present even in the baseline setting. It;s not merely accounted -for-, it's the very accounting of purported bias.

Trouble is, that these are the purported associative metrics for determining biases...and that;s just another wrinkle on top of the basic form of the test, applied in a different form or setting. May as well test my biases by asking me a series of questions related to beyonce while playing whack-a-mole - alternating between my left and right hands. While you may, with a deep enough data set, be able to tease out correlations (lies, damned lies, and statistics)...it just might be that I'm good at whack-mole, and that covers for my lack of truly felt/known beyonce knowledge.

Do you think that a fatty hater, to the very core, couldn't game that test? Is it inconceivable that his performance would indicate little to no implicit bias? If it is possible, -how-...how could he do that, how could it be done? Perhaps by realizing those instances in which the prompts put a "bad" word up before a "fat" sil, or a good word before a skinny sil, and every permutation between, and minding his i's, e's, and reversals. The test positively depends upon a person not realizing that's happening...so is it really a test of bias, or something else? if it is a test of bias, however imperfect, what measure of something else is included in the measure of bias. For example, could the difference between "slight to no bias" and "heavy bias" be accounted for by that "something else" even in an instance in which no conscious attempt to game the system is occurring? Important questions.