Mel Gibson and the IAT
posted by Charles Sullivan
My corner of the academic cabbage patch is consumed these days with whether intent to discriminate includes “unconscious bias,” one of many terms for a phenomenon that is helpfully taxonomized by my colleague Mark Poirier in his article Using Stereotyping and Cognitive Bias Evidence to Prove Gender Discrimination: Is Cognitive Bias at Work a Dangerous Condition on Land?, 7 EMPLOYEE RTS. & EMP. POL’Y J. 459 (2003). Research in this area includes the Implicit Association Test, which you can take from the comfort of your computer to determine your implicit attitudes towards a wide variety of traditional discrimination subjects (race, sex, sexual orientation), and some not so traditional (Presidents). Needless to say, there is a great controversy as to whether this test measures what it purports to measure, and, if so, whether such attitudes are likely to affect conduct in real world situations, and, if so, whether the law can or should do anything about it. Amy Wax savaged the IAT in a co-authored commentary in the Wall Street Journal last December.
Now along comes Mel Gibson and pushes the issue into the limelight. Sort of….
You’ve undoubtedly seen coverage of Mel Gibson’s antisemetic remarks while being busted for DWI. While the story is too well-known to need citation here, I was struck by a comment from Rabbi Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League: ”If it’s true what’s reported, frequently hatred, bigotry and prejudice, which is controlled, explodes at moments of stress and crisis.” He went on ”Liquor loosens the tongue of what’s in the mind and in the heart, and in his mind and in his heart is his conspiracy theory about Jews and hatred of Jews.”
This is, of course, not the first time Mr. Gibson has been accused of anti-Semitism. On this occasion, however, not only did he provide some pretty strong admissions of hostile beliefs as to Jews by the language he used (what Justice O’Connor, with a fine disregard for evidence theory, used to call “direct evidence”) but his condition validated, for Rabbi Foxman, and many others, the depth and emotional salience of these beliefs.
“In vino veritas” predates Mel Gibson (actually, it may predate the events retold in his Passion), but exactly what that old saw means isn’t clear. The Times’ Week in Review summed up the controversy with the headline “Is It the Drunk or the the Drink Doing the Talking?”
One possibility is the obvious — Mel has always known his true beliefs but has concealed them from the public because of the negative reaction they are sure to invoke. When he’s drunk, the gatekeeper is asleep at the wheel, and the true Mel emerges.
But another possibility is that liquor may unleash feelings of which the imbiber is not consciously aware. One of Gibson’s apologies reported that he is “in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display.”
Then there’s a third possibility — some of his friends, including Jewish friends, seem to suggest that it wasn’t him doing the talking at all — it was the drink. Whatever that means.
While I (and no doubt most others) am skeptical about Gibson’s denial of self-knowledge, the whole implicit attitude project suggests that it is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Dr. Kevin Corocoran, identified in the article as “a psychological researcher studying alcohol’s effect, stated that Gibson “may not fully believe” what he said.
I’m not suggesting that researchers move from the computer to the barroom to conduct their studies, nor am I arguing that Professor Wax is necessarily wrong about the limitations (or legal utility) of such research. My point is more limited – we pretty much all believe in strong, if concealed, motivations that, as Foxman argues, are more likely to see the light of day only in moments of stress and crisis, and maybe intoxication. “Concealed” might mean fully known to the person but concealed from the world. But it might alternatively mean motivations that are in some sense concealed from the individual himself — if not the underlying cognitive beliefs at the least the emotional force that Gibson’s statements revealed.
As the courts struggle with the role, if any, for research such as the IAT, they should at least recognize the commonsense basis for such work.
August 8, 2006 at 9:15 am
Posted in: Employment Law
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