#psychological testing

An opinion widely held is not evidence of truth.

To add to my little athenaeum, "The Lucifer Effect Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" by Philip Zimbardo published 2007. Experimental psychology. This book focuses on how environmental factors influence individuals to behave immorally, rather than their inherent personal traits.

My tests were Thursday, and my results are next Wednesday. I'm trying to guess the results ahead of time.

By: Jesse Singal

Published: Dec 5, 2017

At the moment, you may have heard, the field of psychology is grappling with a so-called “replication crisis.” That is, certain findings that everyone had assumed to be true can’t be replicated in follow-up experiments, suggesting the original findings were the result not of actual psychological phenomena, but of various flawed methodologies and biases that have crept into the scientific process.

One of the major contributing factors to the replication crisis, which is centered mostly on social psychology, is human nature. Humans, being humans, do not like hearing that ideas they’ve worked on for a long time might have to get tossed in the bin, or at the very least revised significantly. That’s why some researchers — though by no means all of them — have responded to good-faith critiques of their work by attempting to derail the conversation, calling their critics crazy or mean or attributing to them dark ulterior motives. The researchers who attempt such derailings tend to be established, well-respected ones who have benefited from the old regime — the regime that led the field into its current, precarious situation, and which is now threatened by a growing reform movement.

The implicit association test, co-created by Harvard University psychology chair Mahzarin Banaji and University of Washington researcher Anthony Greenwald, is an excellent example. Banaji and Greenwald claim that the IAT, a brief exercise in which one sits down at a computer and responds to various stimuli, measures unconscious bias and therefore real-world behavior. If you score highly on a so-called black-white IAT, for example, that suggests you will act in a more biased manner toward a black person than a white person. Many social psychologists view the IAT, which you can take on Harvard University’s website, as a revolutionary achievement, and in the 20 years since its introduction it has become both the focal point of an entire subfield of research and a mainstay of diversity trainings all over the country. That’s partly because Banaji, Greenwald, and the test’s other proponents have made a series of outsize claims about its importance for fighting racism and inequality.

The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.

One striking thing about the process of reporting that article was the extent to which Banaji tried to smear her critics, suggesting to me in an email she believed that critiques of the test could be explained by the fact that the IAT “scares people who say things like ‘Look, the water fountains are desegregated, what’s your problem.’” She also accused the test’s critics of having a “pathological focus” on black-white race relations and the black-white IAT for reasons that “will need to be dealt with by them in the presence of their psychotherapists or church leaders.”

This is the definition of a derailing tactic — shift the focus from critiques of the IAT itself, some of which in this case appeared in a flagship social-psych journal, to the ostensible moral and psychological failings of the critiquers.

A couple days ago, Quartz published its own article on the IAT, by Olivia Goldhill. The article covers similar ground and comes to similar conclusions as mine, and adds some new insights and analysis: The headline, “The world is relying on a flawed psychological test to fight racism,” captures things pithily. Goldhill’s piece clearly shows that Banaji and Greenwald are still trying to deflect and derail rather than fully engage with the process of evaluating their test:

It’s highly plausible that the scientists who created the IAT, and now ardently defend it, believe their work will change the world for the better. Banaji sent me an email from a former student that compared her to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, and Michelle Alexander “in elucidating the corrosive and terrifying vestiges of white supremacy in America.” || Greenwald explicitly discouraged me from writing this article. “Debates about scientific interpretation belong in scientific journals, not popular press,” he wrote. Banaji, Greenwald, and Nosek all declined to talk on the phone about their work, but answered most of my questions by email.

The idea that journalists shouldn’t write about scientific controversies would have been highly questionable even before the replication crisis exploded onto the scene, but it’s hard to fathom why anyone would take this argument seriously in 2017. After all, the replication crisis was spurred in part by opaque research and peer-review processes, by people not sharing data, by social and professional structures that sometimes had the effect of short-circuiting real debate about the merits of ideas — particularly popular ones of the sort that often get glowing write-ups in, well, the “popular press” (Greenwald, of course, doesn’t appear to have any problems with positive coverage of the IAT). Journalism, when it’s done well, can serve as a useful check on all these tendencies. To be fair, Greenwald isn’t the only one who thinks that science should only be critiqued by those very close to a given controversy — this is an idea that seems to sometimes pop up among defenders of the old, deeply flawed social-psychological ways — but that isn’t how things should work.

Even more surprising, though, is an email Greenwald wrote to Goldhill which read, “The IAT can be used to select people who would be less likely than others to engage in discriminatory behavior.” This might come across as a fairly banal defense of his research project, but it isn’t: It’s the continuation of a very slippery pattern I identified in my article.

As I noted, in their 2013 best seller Blindspot, which helped the IAT carve out an even bigger place in the public imagination than it had already achieved, Banaji and Greenwald wrote that the test “predicts discriminatory behavior even among research participants who earnestly (and, we believe, honestly) espouse egalitarian beliefs,” and “has been shown, reliably and repeatedly” to do so. In fact, this is a “clearly … established” “empirical truth.” But then, just two years later, they argued in an academic paper unlikely to be read by the general public that due to the test’s methodological weaknesses, it is “problematic to use [it] to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination,” and “attempts to diagnostically use such measures for individuals risk undesirably high rates of erroneous classifications.”

I referred to this as a “Schrödinger’s test” situation in which the test both does and doesn’t predict behavior at the same time. When the test’s creators are addressing lay audiences unfamiliar with its problems, it does predict behavior; when they’re addressing academic audiences familiar with what is now a years-long controversy, they acknowledge that it doesn’t. Greenwald’s quote to Goldhill just marks the latest example.

In other words:

Banaji and Greenwald in 2013, to the public: Our test has been shown, reliably and repeatedly, to predict behavior.

Banaji and Greenwald in 2015, to academics: Our test doesn’t predict behavior.

Greenwald in 2017, to the public: Our test predicts behavior.

So, once more: I disagree with Greenwald. Society desperately needs more open scrutiny of scientific claims, not less, whether in scientific journals, the media, or anywhere else. Especially when it comes to claims that seem to change every two years.

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“tHe IaT iS bAsEd On ScIeNcE!!1!”

No, it’s based on ideology, and perpetuated by a multi-billion dollar church of DEI through faith by priests whose careers don’t exist without it.

https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html

https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psychological-test-to-fight-racism/

https://musaalgharbi.com/2020/09/16/diversity-important-related-training-terrible/

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/7/14637626/implicit-association-test-racism

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/202203/12-reasons-be-skeptical-common-claims-about-implicit-bias

A week out from ASD/Asperger’s testing, and I’m still a bit bewildered by the sheer volume of data they collected. A user on Reddit recently inquired in the r/Aspergers subreddit what sorts of tests, questionnaires, and activities were involved in testing, and, while it seems to vary to some degree from one testing center to the next--and likely from one country to another--it seems that the standard expectation is for questions about your social skills, cognitive tests to determine skills and IQ, and the occasional activity to see how you function in action.

My test ran just over four hours. It would have been a longer set had I taken a break, but I had prepared to go for the long haul by packing snacks and water. My experience was a bit unique in that I had a PhD psychologist along with a PhD student who was earning his clinical hours. I worked thus with two specialists, both of whom were not only knowledgeable but knew how to communicate with individuals on the spectrum. The patience in listening, the careful explanations, even the manner in which they occasionally redirected me to do what they needed for proper assessment--it all translated to understanding the group with whom they worked most closely. And that made the entire process all the more comfortable for me.

The battery started with a pattern re-creation exercise where I was shown graphical representations of designs and then asked to recreate them with colored blocks. I was timed each turn, and the difficulty grew until I was unable to recreate the last challenge. Frustrated, I asked for clarification on the parameters of the test and was met with vague instructions, which I assumed meant they were also testing me on how I solved the problem. I didn’t solve it, so we moved on to the next test.

Identifying the next item in a pattern is something I enjoy doing, and the pressure of the environment didn’t change this aspect for me; however, there were several for which I simply guessed in the test set. We pushed through them all regardless. Next was describing the meaning or features of various words. They grew in complexity as we went along, and as a linguist by training, I found the activity to be a fun challenge. But that was the end of the IQ portion as far as I could tell, which I thought odd. No math or calculations. No qualitative analysis at all. Just logic and verbal skills, which I suppose match ASD cognitive qualities.

Then came the questions interspersed with activities. The questions and topics were conversational and lent themselves to more open-ended discussions. Tell me about your friendships and relationships. What things to people do that irritate you? Describe what you do to relax. How do you feel in social situations? Tell me about your job and career. The psychologist seemed to understand a great deal of what I mentioned, as if he’d heard it multiple times before.

These questions and discussions were interspersed with activities to, as they phrased it, “get to know you better.” In one instance I was asked to use random objects to create a story; in another I was asked to stand up and retell a very short story I had just read but in my own words. In one I found very odd, I was asked to instruct the proctor on how to perform a common activity as if he’d never been taught how to do it. Each of these was extremely awkward for me, and though I occasionally thought I knew what they were assessing, I often finished the activity thinking they had been assessing something else entirely.

The final set was over 400 statements that I had to rank. Some were how well they applied to me. Others were how long, if at all, the statements had applied. Several questionnaires were on paper but a good portion was on the computer. What energy I had left was sucked out of me by the last bit, and I was extremely relieved when they announced the testing was complete.

To get a better sense of who I was, though, they did ask if they could contact my parents and my husband. I learned afterward that the discussion with my mother was to learn about any developmental issues I had experienced as a child, while the questionnaires they sent my husband were similar to those I had filled out, we presume for comparison with my own perception of my personality and habits.

It’s okay to be nervous! I definitely was before I had my appointment to hear the results of the evaluation. I did my evaluation with a psychologist who specialized in ADHD. It started with an interview where she determined that doing an evaluation was necessary. Then there were maybe two or three sessions where we did more interviews, different questionnaires, as well as the WAIS-IV IQ test. I remember feeling like I just rambled on for hours during the interviews and I always walked away feeling like I’d forgotten to mention that one super important thing. I also felt like I wasn’t properly communicating how difficult things are for me, which made me nervous because I worried that she wouldn’t think it was serious enough for a diagnosis. Before I got my results I was terrified because I’d grown to identify so strongly with everything I’d read for over a year before that point, and what if it wasn’t ADHD? The results did end up showing ADHD-PI though, which just goes to show that I shouldn’t have worried so much about how well I was explaining things; the parts I had trouble with were noticeable either way. 

After that appointment I felt so relieved. It didn’t really change anything, but it felt so great to get confirmation on this thing I’d been wondering about for over a year. It didn’t make anything easier or make any of my symptoms change, but somehow it helped to be able to know the reason behind it with certainty. There’s just something about knowing for sure instead of just speculating and wondering. 

The only advice I have is what you’ve already said; be yourself and just be honest. Also don’t be afraid to ask your doctor or psychologist about the different parts of the evaluation. They won’t always be able to tell you to avoid affecting results but you are part of the process and you should feel comfortable with all parts of it. Good luck, and feel free to let us know how it goes!

Followers, what are some of your memories from evaluations?

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Conclusion