Psychologists who created Implicit Association Test conceded that it had severe measurement problems

See ‘The Quick Fix’ Review: A Bias Toward Easy Answers: The study of human behavior has led to real insights but also, too often, to simplistic, reductive ‘solutions’ to complex problems. Sally Satel reviews The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal. Excerpt: 

"The timeliest chapter in “The Quick Fix” concerns the Implicit Association Test, known as IAT: It supposedly reveals hidden biases that can bubble to the surface in people who explicitly renounce discriminatory beliefs or intent. The computer-administered reaction-time test evaluates how strongly a person associates certain concepts, such as “black” and “white,” with words like “good” and “bad.” Someone who is quicker to link a black face with a negative word than she is to link a white face to the same word is deemed to harbor submerged, but nonetheless real, bias. 

Eventually the psychologists who created the test conceded that it had severe measurement problems. Among other things, it turned out that the IAT had notoriously low reliability, meaning that a subject could score “prejudiced” one day but not the next. And the test lacked predictive power or, as the creators acknowledged, was “problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination.” Nonetheless, the IAT has a vast reach. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of employees of corporations, foundations, universities, government agencies and police departments have taken the IAT—and have been told of the biases they possess but do not feel. After the killing of George Floyd, the popularity of the IAT exploded, despite the fact that it can’t predict the behavior that creates a racially unjust society."