[financeprof]

My daughter had to take one of these "tests" as a class assignment. Out of curiosity, I took it as well. It reminded me of a 3 Card Monte game. They first drill you click with your right middle finger when a photo of a white person or a positive word (eg "happiness") appears on the screen, and with your left middle fingerwhen a black photo or negative word appears. Then they switch things around. Once you're in a particular groove you get thrown off when things are reversed. If you are slower on the second round, it is allegedly a sign of latent preference for whites over blacks.

This seems like complete BS--pseudoscience at its worst. How this can possibly be validated is beyond me, and any "test" that can't be validated independently is garbage. Another tipoff to the pseudoscientific nature of the exercise--when my daughter raised these objections in class, her teacher accused her of "denying her biases." Such responses are common in pseudosciences--note that Marxists claimed that critics were just reflecting latent class biases, and Freudians attacked critics as being prisoners of an unconscious mind that couldn't accept the truth. These are non-refutable "theories" and hence unscientific.

[VOA]

...when my daughter raised these objections in class, her teacher
accused her of "denying her biases."

Tell your daughter that she won this battle.
Her teacher is probably still fuming that she couldn't get your
daughter into a full "show trial" and shipped to a gulag.

[SteveMcKing]

Indeed my goal was to lay focus on the kind of human beings who produce these studies - but if the study itself is lame or invalid, then all the more poignant.