Science Spin September 2007

Shattering the PC myth

By Shane Leavy

Most of us like to believe that we are tolerant, civilised people that do not hold prejudices or biases against others. But, how true are these assumptions? Not very, it seems, as new methods of analysing probing psychological tests are revealing that deep-down many of us are not as 'politically correct' as we might like to believe.

This author was shocked to discover that the dark unconscious of his mind was actually quite a bit wickeder than he had ever realised. Years of arguing that one should judge people as individuals rather than by sex, race, nationality, or age, had left me assuming that I was an open-minded, unprejudiced person. How wrong I was.

The reason for the author's discomfort is to be found in the results of an Implicit Association Test, or IAT. The test informed him that subconsciously he has "a strong automatic preference for light skin compared to dark skin". The test also found that he has a strong preference for young faces over old, and, that he regards white people carrying guns as being less dangerous than black people carrying guns.

The author was stunned to discover that -- deep down -- is quite the fascist.

Thankfully, the two main Dublin synagogues can take some consolation from the fact that the author didn't respond to this self-image challenging news by slapping on a swastika and growing an Adolf moustache -- his beliefs are so heavily buried in his unconscious that he wasn't even aware of them.

The psychological methods that revealed these deep-seated beliefs is the work of Dr Yvonne Barnes-Holmes and her husband Professor Dermot Barnes-Holmes, both NUI Maynooth. They have developed an Implicit Rational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), based on analysis of the answers to the IAT that this author agreed to take.

"The tricky question is, to what extent does this implicit belief correlate with explicit behaviour?" questioned Yvonne. "So, we're not saying that we can tell a racist from a non-racist, we're just asking if people differ in their explicit and implicit responses and it certainly looks like they do."

The Barnes-Holmes team have been fine-tuning the IRAP for the last two years in an attempt to address some of the criticisms that were aimed at IAT's methodology. So, first of all let's take a look at the IAT, and where that emerged from.

Prejudices

When US psychologist Dr Tony Greenwald first created the IAT in 1998, his test was based on a simple idea. Psychologists had discovered that when people were asked to quickly associate negative words with one group of people, and positive words with another, they tended to reply faster when they agreed with the particular positive or negative association, than when they disagreed with it.

In an IAT test, the test subject is shown, for example, photographs with old faces and photographs with young faces. The subjects are then told to always hit the letter 'e' on the keyboard, whenever they see an old face, or a positive word flashing up on their computer screen, such as joy, laughter or love. The subjects are further told to hit the letter 'i' on the keyboard when they see a young face or a negative word on their computer screen, such as sad, death, or terrible. The subjects are asked to perform these tasks as fast as they can manage.

After a few minutes of this, the test switches. The subjects are now told to hit the letter 'e' when they see photographs of old faces or flashes of negative terms on their computer screen. Similarly, the subjects are asked to hit 'i' when they see photographs of young faces or flashes of positive terms on screen.

The results are fascinating. The vast majority of people asked to perform this test, including the author, were able to more quickly associate positive terms with young faces, and negative terms with older faces, than the opposite situations. The conclusion must be that there is an inbuilt negative bias against older people, amongst many of us, and an inbuilt positive bias towards younger people.

Dermot Barnes-Holmes explained: "If you ask people to respond in a way that's consistent with their implicit beliefs, (that is) their unconscious beliefs, then they seem to respond significantly faster."

However, though IAT was useful, it had a weakness. The problem was that it was working solely with words and pictures, and it did not clearly depict the actual relationship between them. For example, a person might closely associate the words 'black' and 'white' even though they are opposites. The Barnes-Holmes' wanted to find out how these terms actually related to one another, and so, they devised the IRAP. This worked by not simply associating isolated words or images, but it also worked with full sentences, questions and statements.

The results again proved to be eye-opening.

Dermot said: "We compared Scottish, American and African people in questionnaires and also in an IRAP test. The idea was that we would find people saying "I hate Americans" in the explicit test, because of Iraq or something like that. The 'politically correct' answer is to say, "Oh, I prefer Africans; they're the poor oppressed nations".

"But implicitly there's a bias in the other direction, because we wear American jeans, watch American TV, and there's a far closer cultural connection there. The explicit tests reported that Americans were the least popular, but when you look at the IRAP, they were faster saying they preferred Americans to Africans."

The IRAP cut through subjects' (in this case Irish people) politically correct, socially acceptable responses and found out their genuine preference for Americans over Africans. But, the IRAP can do more than detect prejudices. The project is ambitious and the information it reveals might be disturbing to some people.

Paedophilia

As the Barnes-Holmes were working on the IRAP project, a student, in training to become a clinical psychologist, approached them with a proposal - to apply an IRAP test to convicted paedophiles. Convicted child abusers are asked to complete ordinary explicit questionnaires regarding child sexuality, as part of their course of treatment. It is known that paedophiles tend to make children more sexual in these questionnaires than would ordinary people.

Dermot explained: "One of the questions might be, for example, would an eight-year-old enjoy sexual innuendo? A child sex offender would be more likely to strongly agree that, yes, they would."

Child sex abusers were again given the explicit tests, after 100 weeks of extensive therapy, and they were found to have completely changed. Not only did they not distort children's sexuality, but they actually showed less distortion than an ordinary sample of the population. This could be assumed to be a major sign of success in the treatment.

However, when the clinical psychology student mentioned above, tested the convicted paedophiles with the IRAP, along with a control group of ordinary people, the results were shocking.

Dermot again: "On the IRAP, the normal group are showing massive scores, which indicate that children are not sexual. A very, very strong result. But, the child sex offenders, who had undergone treatment, actually were showing no statistically significant difference from zero. They were confirming and disconfirming that children were sexual with equal likelihood - even though explicitly they were saying "absolutely not".

What does this result tell us?

Does it suggest that convicted paedophiles are consciously lying on the explicit questionnaires because after all that therapy they know what is expected of them? Or are they unaware that unconsciously they still sexualise children?

Yvonne Barnes-Holmes, meanwhile, is quick to point out that ultimately it is the behaviour of people that matters, not the unconscious attitudes that they may hold. Just as this author, with an apparent implicit preference for lighter-skinned people, does not behave in an openly racist manner, a treated sex offender may well be in control of his behaviour -- whatever his unconscious attitude may be -- and, therefore is not a threat to society.

Yvonne added: "I don't think you could ever really get an accurate expression of the degree of manipulation that is going on

Sometimes we present people with a whole battery of explicit measures in order to see do they respond in a politically correct way. Very commonly, the more sensitive the subject the more politically correct their explicit views, but unfortunately the more politically correct their implicit views."

Sometimes the Barnes-Holmes are asked whether the implicit tests act like 'lie detectors', said Dermot. "The IRAP is not designed at present as a lie detector. The reason for that is that while some participants involved would be actually trying to conceal a fact, another might not."

Dangers

There are dangers associated with IRAP, as it intrudes on the unconscious mind.

Could tyrant governments force populations to sit IRAP tests to find out whether they hold any implicit negativity towards the leadership? If so, would such unfortunates end up in 're-education camps' or worse?

It's not just tyrants of course that want to know peoples' real beliefs and feelings.

Could IRAP be used to help advertising companies? For example, could ad executives, or survey people acting on their behalf, sit large numbers of test subjects in front of sample ads, and then run an IRAP to see exactly how effective that advertisement was, in affecting the audience on an unconscious level?

Could IRAP be abused by politicians, or large corporations? For instance, if a person applies for a job in Fianna Fáil or a large US multi-national, could the potential employers run an IRAP to make sure that the potentially employee harbours no hidden negative feelings towards the organisation? Where would it all stop?

Psychiatry

One of the main potential uses for IRAP is in testing people with mental health problems, before and after treatment, so that the treatment can be seen more clearly to be working, or not working, as the case may be. The standard treatment as applied to paedophiles, as mentioned before, comes to mind here.

There are many areas of human psychology that IRAP could help shed a light on, and some of the early results are astonishing.

One of the Barnes-Holmes' doctoral students, an experienced teacher, created an IRAP study into attitudes among teachers towards children. Amazingly, it was discovered that teachers had a very negative implicit attitude towards children, but a very positive implicit attitude towards other teachers.

Yvonne explained: "It's not that there's anything wrong with these teachers. In fact, what she (the doctoral researcher) is going to say is that it's okay to have negative attitudes. It's not attitude policing, it's just attitude checking. It's absolutely okay to have these attitudes, but what are you going to do with your behaviour?

"Perhaps if you have negative attitudes and you then think "Oh, I shouldn't tell anybody that", then you feel ashamed. Then the attitude is more likely to affect your behaviour. So, it's not about changing the attitudes, it's about being okay with them and changing the behaviour that follows."

Dermot commented: "Very often the folks who are responding like this are not aware of it, and that in itself can create problems psychologically. If somebody is working in a professional environment which is stressful -- nursing, teaching or something -- and they don't even know that they're stressed because they're trying to be perfect, and trying not to have any negative feelings, there can be problems."

"There is evidence that when you have an intervention for professionals who work in those contexts, that allows them to discuss with colleagues how they feel and discuss the negative aspects of the job, you reduce, very substantially, burnout, absenteeism and stress, and you create a better professional by allowing them to admit to the negative thoughts and feelings they might have."

Cheating

What if those people being tested by IRAP are aware of how IRAP works and try to cheat the system?

The Barnes-Holmes have created numerous mathematical algorithms aimed at tackling the cheats, and they are aiming to continue to improve IRAP defences against possible cheaters. Last year, one of the couple's students ran 'faking studies' in which they got an audience to try and fool the test. But, to no avail -- the IRAP held up well, and appears to be quite sturdy.

Conclusion

The initial tests have shown the IRAP to be as effective as, and in some cases more effective than, the IAT.

The IRAP certainly raises some fascinating and disturbing possibilities, and offers the world a powerful, new psychological tool. It also put a dent in this author's complacent politically-correct smugness.

- Those brave individuals that are willing to bare their souls can take an online IAT test available by clicking here.