Snails, snakes, primates, people—the countless species share a similar web of basic reflexes, so alike that it’s humbling to the human who cares to ponder how close we come to sea slugs. Poke the purple aplysia with an electric prong and the slippery being winces. Similarly, tap a specific spot on my knee with a red rubber hammer and I’ll respond with a twitch. Unlike the body parts of other, simpler animals, however, my knee is so much more than that little movement. The human knee joint is a complex interplay of cartilage, bone, nerve, vein, brain, memory, and improvisation; so is my mind. So is yours.

I don’t, therefore, require a psychological test to tell me what my prejudices are. And although I score high on truth-telling (according to the MMPI, one of the psychological tests I’ve taken), it’s hard for me to believe that most others must rely on such a test either—especially if privileged with a basic liberal arts education or a television, both of which these days prize confession. For the most part, one needn’t look very hard or long to find, buried in the creases of the cortex, all of the private ugliness we hide from view, the mental reflexes we have as surely as the physical ones. There they are, those little cognitive kicks and twitches that cause all manner of wrong thinking, even when we know better.

My assumption, however—the assumption that we know better—is probably almost entirely at odds with the assumptions that powered the now widely disseminated Implicit Association Test, created by Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia, and Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington. Designed in 1998, the IAT was intended to be a near-foolproof tool that would uncover people’s hidden biases, allowing them to begin to grapple with the true nature of their soiled souls. The IAT tests volunteer subjects for any of a number of possible prejudices—racism, ageism, sexism—and rests on the contention that while many people profess one belief, they harbor another, often without even knowing it.

Gaining access to the mechanisms of most psychological tests is extremely hard; they’re usually hidden away in locked black briefcases and administered in strict secrecy. The IAT, refreshingly, is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Flick on your computer and it springs to the screen, sends you questions in seconds, and then tidily calculates your score, presenting you with a measure of how biased you are, be it against animals or Africans or aging folks or females. The mechanics of the test are straightforward; it asks you to pair certain words with certain images—for instance, “criminal” or “angry” with a photo of a black versus a white face. It calculates your bias, or attitude score, based on how fast, or reflexively, you pair negative words with a certain race, creed, color, gender, what-have-you.

More than three million people have taken the widely available IAT, which has amply demonstrated that the test takers have strong biases. For instance, three-quarters of white and Asian U.S. test takers display an implicit preference for white people over black people. Roughly one half of black people show the same bias. Findings such as these may be part of the reason many social psychologists have heralded the test as a highly valid way to squeeze inside our sealed skulls and draw out “the truth” as one might pull pus from a pimple. And while my wording might seem unfairly overstated, the IAT website itself uses similar imagery, albeit of a more clinical nature. It claims the test “makes it possible to penetrate” the psyche’s secrets—as though the test were a scalpel, or a scan.

PET scans and MRIs have all sorts of validity issues; in my biased opinion, the IAT does, too, despite the psychology community’s claims to the contrary. Surely the IAT can aid reflection, especially for people who are not prone to interiority. The principal validity problem is that the test seems to be measuring the psychological equivalent of a physical reflex, and the human organism, unlike some of its simpler colleagues on this blue ball, lives far beyond its reflexes. In a timed situation, someone may reflexively push buttons that associate negative words with women or whales, but what does that tell us about how that individual actually feels and acts towards women and whales in real-life situations? Unlike the aplysia, human beings possess the capacity to mediate or even disregard our spastic thoughts—not always, but often.

I don’t need to take an IAT to know that I’d probably come up prejudiced against certain groups, but so far there’s little in my life to suggest that I’d act on this unfortunate mental glitch; reflection is the antidote to reflex.

I did, by the way, submit to the IAT; I took the one that attempts to measure one’s attitude toward old people. My score indicated that I harbor a strong preference for youth. And of course I do, when it comes to sex, the supermarket, and waitresses (oops—waiters, too; no bias there). But what about my grandmother? I was surprised by how sad I was when she died, because I hardly knew her. She used to buy me silver-dollar pancakes when I was young. She had magnificent silver hair, it was shining and sterling even in her casket, which was open. Since her funeral, I have sought the company of old people, in hospitals, in hospices, in books. I am drawn to that fragility, that thin skin. I find some of it beautiful, much of it brave. What is this attitude of mine? All I know so far is that there is no test to tell me.

(For more information and to take the IAT, visit [http://www.implicit.harvard.edu] .)

---

Lauren Slater is a Boston-based writer and therapist. She has written seven books on psychology, including Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (Penguin, 2000).