| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 |
« Glynn on "Assessing the Empirical Evidence for Mechanism Specific Causal Effects" | Main | Election Wrap-up: Ballot Design »
18 November 2008
In today's paper, the NYT reports on an interesting debate between two groups of researchers regarding studies on unconscious racial bias (``In Bias Test, Shades of Gray''). The discussion centers around the usefulness of an online test, the Implicit Association Test, which measures how quickly respondents associate ``good'' or ``bad'' words with blacks or whites. How useful are such tests? It does seem crude as metric for racial bias (try it yourself here). But I suspect that they have raised awareness and deserve credit for involving a wide audience. Yet despite its timid recommendations and disclaimers when the results are displayed the test could also be misleading: what if you're characterized as racially bias (but are not)? What if you're characterized as unbiased (but are and should be told)?
Posted by Sebastian Bauhoff at November 18, 2008 12:03 AM