Being hesitant to uncritically embrace iffy research that supports our politics can be really hard. In myself I even notice a tendency when looking at research

Being hesitant to uncritically embrace iffy research that supports our politics can be really hard. In myself I even notice a tendency when looking at research on controversial subjects to put more weight on articles that I "like" going in, and I will sometimes go as far as to interpret articles that disagree with my views as partially supporting them, if read in a certain way. The thing is, it's 100% correct to evaluate new claims in light of your priors. That's absolutely necessary if you want to make good decisions - my expectation that special relativity will not be shown to be inconsistent is so strong that no matter how interesting or new an argument is against it, I will shred it to bits way more viciously than I'd pick apart a simple replication of special relativity's claims. But. Some priors don't come from reliable places, and we have to be way more careful about applying them. In general, the more politically or socially relevant an issue is (gender, race, money, morals) the less any of us should trust both a) our own priors, and b) the priors of researchers in the area, who have many ways to unwittingly and without bad intention put fingers on the scale. In those situations we really have to throw our hands up and wait for meta-analyses to tell us what's up. In this case, it's super worth noting that even if the IAT is a garbage test, that doesn't mean that implicit bias doesn't exist, or that racism is not a problem. It just means the test doesn't measure it, and we shouldn't be funding further research that leans on it as a tool. Which is why I really don't understand why criticisms of the test draw such intense opposition.