To the Editor:

A new wave of literature in para-psychology has been abound in academia for a while now, and over the past few years has made its way into the mainstream: The notion of implicit bias.

One can call this the “new esp.” It is an attempt to mind-read a racist or sexist before racism or sexism manifests, much like “stop and frisk” and broken windows policing are meant to stop crime before crime manifests.

Both ideas have different origins; however, the underlying logic is the same. The advocates of the notion that implicit bias is real insist that it is a noble attempt to curb racism and sexism before they manifest and harm others.

This is indeed a noble goal, but the methodology and logic used are deeply flawed.

For instance, did you stop reading this as soon as you discovered that the author is of Irish descent? Probably not. But if you did stop reading, how would one know that it was due to my Irish ancestry that you stopped reading? How would I know that your subconscious triggered something when you made the connection between my last name and my writing?

Unless one admitted that was the reason why, the claim that you have an implicit bias against Irish people is an unfalsifiable proposition since mind-reading is impossible.

Social psychologists therefore resort to “implicit bias tests” like having participants hit a key on a keyboard whenever a picture of a black man and a gun are shown — the speed of hitting the key correlating to whether or not one has implicit bias.

Of course, one can do poorly by being a slow typer or spilling one’s cola. Implicit bias has serves as a “God of the gaps” for psychology. That is, if something cannot be explained psychologically, one attributes the phenomenon to implicit bias in much the same way as some theists attribute seemingly unexplainable phenomenon to God.

Better research tools are needed if social psychologists are to discover implicit bias, but as of now, we are justified in rejecting the new esp.

Bill Kennedy

Bowling Green