Scarce societal resources have been wasted due to mistaken beliefs about the power and prevalence of unconscious bias

From Stretching the Limits of Science: Was the Implicit-Racism Debate a “Bridge Too Far” for Social Psychology? by Gregory Mitchell and Philip E. Tetlock.

Ask an employee of any public company if the topic of unconscious bias came up in the company’s most recent diversity training session, and chances are good that she will respond “yes” (see, e.g., Zelevansky, 2019). Review the contents of the student orientation program at any liberal arts college, and you will probably find a session devoted to the pernicious effects of unconscious bias (see, e.g., Rao, 2020). Search the New York Times website for the phrase “unconscious bias” and more than 250 articles will appear. Interview anyone who regularly watches MSNBC about the causes of racial inequalities in the United States, and we would wager a week’s pay that unconscious bias will be mentioned as an important cause (cf. Kam & Engelhardt, Chapter 29 this volume; Baskakova et al., Chapter 28, this volume). Review articles from the last ten years of any randomly selected social science journal outside psychology (yes, even an economics journal), and we would wager an even larger sum that multiple articles discuss the significance of unconscious bias. If you dig deep enough, you will find a common source for all these references to unconscious bias: research using an Implicit Association Test (“IAT”) (Greenwald et al., 1998).

After doing one of these tasks to verify that “unconscious bias” figures prominently in public understandings of racism, interview a reasonably well-informed social psychologist and ask whether the racial attitudes IAT (or “the race IAT”) measures unconscious bias, whether an individual’s score on the race IAT reliably predicts that person’s behavior during interracial interactions, whether the race IAT measures the strength of category associations within one’s mind or something about the ambient social environment, and whether training sessions on implicit bias prevent implicit bias. For reasons discussed in this book (e.g., Arkes, Chapter 11 this volume; Fazio et al., Chapter 2 this volume; Jussim et al., Chapter 13 this volume; Meissner & Rothermund, Chapter 18 this volume; Wolsiefer & Blair, Chapter 8 this volume) and elsewhere (e.g., Blanton & Jaccard, 2008; Corneille & Hütter, 2020; Forscher et al., 2019; Hahn et al., 2014; Lai et al., 2014; Schimmack, 2021; Tetlock & Mitchell, 2009), the informed psychologist should answer “no” or “I don’t know” to all these questions. 
 
How did we reach this place where public understanding of what the race IAT reveals about racism and how to combat it diverges so greatly from that of the scientifically well-informed? And where do we go from here? We reflect on the highly successful, and highly misleading, public education campaign associated with the race IAT and why the psychological research community was so slow to react to unsubstantiated claims about the potency and pervasiveness of unconscious racism. Scarce societal resources, including opportunities to develop effective interventions to address ongoing inequities, have been wasted due to mistaken beliefs about the power and prevalence of unconscious bias – beliefs attributable to social psychology’s valorization of the race IAT and failure to correct unwarranted speculation about what the race IAT reveals.