There are a lot of studies purporting to show that there’s a subconscious bias against people other races in everyone, or perhaps just in white people. I think it’s understandable that many people are skeptical of such things. Scientific claims to know what’s going on in everyone’s subconscious started with Sigmund Freud, who said that men are subconsciously attracted to their mothers and that women subconsciously have penis envy. His claims weren’t true, and neither were a great many other supposedly scientific findings about the subconscious.
The article that you linked to is about a survey of researching attempting to determine which regions of the brain are active when people are making judgments after seeing someone’s race. The tool being used is MRI brain scans, and there are many seriously reasons to be doubtful about MRIs being used in that way. Indeed, at the moment there seems to be no reliable proof that MRIs can isolate what brain region is used for any social tasks.
More generally, in psychology research, most results can’t be replicated. There are a great many possible causes: small and unrepresentative samples, bias towards positive findings, outright fraud. Findings about subconscious racism are among those that have proved difficult to replicate, to put it mildly.
Even before the Reproducibility Project, direct replications failed to find evidence for many other effects that the social psychology literature treats as settled science. “Single-exposure conditioning”—if you’re offered a pen while your favorite music is playing, you’ll like the pen better than one offered while less appealing music plays. The “primacy of warmth effect,” which tells us our perceptions are more favorable to people described as “warm” than to people described as “competent.” The “Romeo and Juliet effect”: Intervention by parents in a child’s romantic relationship only intensifies the feelings of romance. None of these could be directly replicated.
Perhaps most consequentially, replications failed to validate many uses of the Implicit Association Test, which is the most popular research tool in social psychology. Its designers say the test detects unconscious biases, including racial biases, that persistently drive human behavior. Sifting data from the IAT, social scientists tell us that at least 75 percent of white Americans are racist, whether they know it or not, even when they publicly disavow racial bigotry. This implicit racism induces racist behavior as surely as explicit racism. The paper introducing the IAT’s application to racial attitudes has been cited in more than 6,600 studies, according to Google Scholar. The test is commonly used in courts and classrooms across the country.
That the United States is in the grip of an epidemic of implicit racism is simply taken for granted by social psychologists—another settled fact too good to check. Few of them have ever returned to the original data. Those who have done so have discovered that the direct evidence linking IAT results to specific behavior is in fact negligible, with small samples and weak effects that have seldom if ever been replicated. One team of researchers went through the IAT data on racial attitudes and behavior and concluded there wasn’t much evidence either way.
“The broad picture that emerges from our reanalysis,” they wrote, “is that the published results [confirming the IAT and racism] are likely to be conditional and fragile and do not permit broad conclusions about the prevalence of discriminatory tendencies in American society.” Their debunking paper, “Strong Claims and Weak Evidence,” has been cited in fewer than 100 studies.
