The Impetus for the Research Program Was an Article of Faith

There was this widespread belief in academia that prejudice had gone kind of underground, and so we needed measures to capture it. The IT effect is when non-black people show a reaction time difference whereby it's easier to do white, pleasant, black, unpleasant than the other way around. And almost anybody who's got, you know, most people who are not white will find that easier to do. So what you have then was this flood of papers mainly by IT and plus bias advocates starting in the late 90s. It creates this impression that any claim about implicit bias is well established because they're published in peer review journals.