To ask is to answer. Here comes that ideological bias again. And Freedman advises us that, when we see such incentives, we should be on the lookout for further telltale clues. He is especially wary of claims that are dramatic (claiming to have invented the psychological equivalent of the telescope qualifies—and so too does claiming that American civil-rights law needs to be rewritten to accommodate the new telescope’s discoveries); of claims that are a tad too clear-cut (devoid of qualifications about when propositions do and do not hold); claims that are doubt free (portraying findings as beyond reasonable doubt and one’s measure as 100 percent pure); claims that are universal (implying that one is tapping into powerful unconscious forces that, hitherto unbeknownst to us, drive all human behavior); claims that are palatable (claims likely to appeal to one’s favorite ideological constituencies); claims that receive a lot of positive media attention (the IAT has been widely covered in the mass media and millions have visited the website); and, claims that carry actionable implications (claims about what employers now need to do to guarantee true equality of opportunity in workplaces).

Using Freedman’s criteria, then, this is not a close call. When it comes to the IAT, virtually all of the warning lights are flashing. Whatever may be the merits of the underlying science in the peer-reviewed literature, in the public forum, the ratio of pseudoexpertise to genuine expertise is distressingly high.

 

IF WE are doomed to get it wrong so much of the time, whether because of our own statistical deficiencies or the manipulation of the experts (or our own biases), what are we to do? Kathryn Schulz to the rescue . . . ? Certainly, she adopts a kinder, gentler approach than either Seife or Freedman. She is no scold and she does not go for checklists (she is not easily reduced to PowerPoint). But she asks a lot of her readers: to back off from their own belief systems and look at themselves with a remarkable degree of philosophical detachment. Her forgiving premise is that we are all deeply flawed thinkers and we would do ourselves—and those around us—a huge favor if we would come to grips with that fact and learn to laugh at ourselves. She sees the psychological obstacles but suggests that this is no impossible dream. We all have the potential to approach error in a convivial, as opposed to ego-defensive, spirit. After all, we enjoy perceptual illusions that dumbfound us, murder mysteries that stump us, magicians who violate our basic assumptions about cause and effect, comedies of error that play misperceptions off misperceptions. Schulz is continually gently prodding us into open-mindedness and it works—but only up to a point. I fear she asks for superhuman detachment. I could easily imagine each side of a bitterly polarized argument, such as the great unconscious-racism debate, immersing themselves in this delightful book but reemerging to engage with one another just as self-righteously as before.

Indeed, in the debates I have witnessed—and participated in—each side may have a sense of humor, but it is not playful, self-critical Schulzian humor; rather, it is of the Hobbesian sort, aimed at ridiculing the other and relishing one’s moral and cognitive superiority. I know many scientists who pay homage to Karl Popper’s doctrine of “falsificationism”—the importance of being able to articulate the conditions under which you would change your mind and jettison your pet hypotheses. But the falsificationists I know hate to be falsified on any issue close to their core identity. They don’t find that prospect one bit funny. They have too much reputation at stake. The same applies to other professionals—and to none more than politicians who spend large fractions of their working lives putting positive spins on negative outcomes. We take ourselves so seriously, in large part, because we think others care whether we are right or wrong, and that they will not be as forgiving of error as is Schulz. In the end, I wonder whether Schulz would really welcome a demonstration that her “optimistic meta-induction from the history of everything” is just so much wishful thinking, rooted in a misconception that humans are far more Schulzian than they are?

Schulz’s book is also the psychologically deepest of the three—so it is easy to see roughly where she would fall in the great unconscious-racism debate. On the one hand, she would see worrisome signs of hubris in the unconscious-bias movement—and a tone of aggrieved sarcasm on both sides. On the other hand, she knows a lot about the workings of the human mind and appreciates that there is a lot of evidence that much thought is driven by subconscious processes to which we have limited or no access (a well-established proposition in my view). And, as a liberal, she should also be reflexively sympathetic to the effort to identify subtle unconscious processes that are harming the traditionally disadvantaged.

 

SO WHERE does all this leave us? After the rhetorical dust settles, it leaves us roughly where we would have been without the metaexperts: conservatives and liberals will mostly hold firm to their original reactions (chastened a bit, I hope, by the turnabout thought experiment and the authors’ warnings about motivated-reasoning biases). Conservatives will still be prone to laugh off the liberal-academic mischief makers. We have come a long way from Selma, Alabama, if we have to measure prejudice in millisecond differentials of how long it takes people to classify words as good or bad and faces as black or white. And liberals will still be prone to furrow their brows over potential ways such rapid-fire “biases” could affect important decisions. Some of the scenarios that liberals conjure up—differential eye blinking as a source of racial bias in interviews—will invite conservative ridicule. But other scenarios should give even hard-line conservatives pause. The most plausible worst-case scenario comes, in my view, from shooter-bias studies in which millisecond differentials do matter—and can cause police (black as well as white) to be quicker to shoot black suspects in identical experimental situations.

Of course, beyond ideological perceptions, there is an underlying reality. My best guess is that there are significant kernels of truth in the claims about unconscious bias. But no one yet knows the final resolution of the controversy over the much-publicized IAT—and there are good reasons to be suspicious of the claims linked to the test about the pervasiveness and potency of unconscious bias in American life and of spin-off claims about the necessity to resort to numerical goals and quotas to check such prejudice. The truth will probably be far more qualified than the original claims of the most ardent proselytizers of the IAT. To be sure, there may be some quite-artificial conditions under which the test does, to a very limited degree, allow us to identify racial discriminators who could not have been identified using explicit measures of conscious attitudes. But even that modest accomplishment will almost certainly come at a steep cost in the false-positive labeling of the fair-minded. Media hype aside, all of this hardly amounts to a clincher case for rewriting American civil-rights laws. But don’t count on banner-headline retractions.

 

IF WISHES were horses, beggars would ride. Reading these books will not transform the citizenry into thoughtful policy analysts. The start-up costs of becoming a sophisticated consumer of expertise are nontrivial. The authors try to make it look easy, but, as any bona fide expert on human cognition can tell you (trust me), it is hard to make critical-reasoning skills stick and harder still to make them transfer to new domains. We rely on experts, in part, because we don’t have the time and energy to think things through on our own.

Even more so, some promised benefits will be elusive. Behavioral game theorists (what you get when you cross a psychologist with a mathematician) teach us that there will always be a predator-prey relationship between the more and less cognitively sophisticated, regardless of whether we peg the average policy IQ at 80, 100 or 120. In this view, we are—whether we know it or not—perpetually enmeshed in an intellectual arms race with those around us. It would be nice to be as clever as Freedman, Schulz and Seife, or, for that matter, Martin Feldstein or Cass Sunstein or Larry Summers, but in the long run, we are merely upgrading to better classes of fools—and even if we were to get ourselves up to speed on all the ways in which the proverbial statistical wool can be pulled over our less knowledgeable eyes, the masters of the dark arts of pseudoexpertise deception will quickly learn to ramp up their game.

It is unrealistic to expect the average citizen to work through a long checklist of warning indicators every time they confront a new expert. People routinely and rapidly decide how to decide—and, given the harried lives we lead, the most attractive option is often that which requires the least effort. The average citizen understandably counts on experts to relieve them of the moral and intellectual burdens of thinking through each issue on his or her own. Laudable, then, though the efforts of these authors are, people will continue to rely on experts as mostly uncritically as before.

Image: Essay Types: Book Review