Speaker
Jeffrey Yen, University of Toronto
Title
The two-faced psychology of prejudice: Public encounters with the Implicit Association Test
Abstract
In describing the contradictory nature of the discipline of psychology, the late Steinar Kvale characterized it as a Janus head. One face speaks the subjective, interiorized language of personal transformation and development, evoking the therapeutic domain and authorizing a psychology of “human concerns”, while the other face speaks through the distanced and objective idiom of statistics and experimental rigor, legitimizing a “psychology as natural science”. The two faces, though contradictory, are also mutually dependent, bolstering psychology’s claims to scientific truth, while sustaining the public relevance and personal allure of the discipline.
In this talk, I will consider the play of these two identities of psychology—and of the social psychology of prejudice in particular—by presenting some aspects of my dissertation research on public encounters with the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Specifically, I discuss how the IAT—in its computerized claims to tap into our unconscious prejudices—represents a negotiation of this contradictory identity, and in so doing also consider the ways in which social psychology’s public are reflexively positioned in relation to it.