AUTHORS’ RESPONSE The Implicit Prejudice Exchange: Islands of Consensus in a Sea of Controversy

Some commentators dismiss Arkes and Tetlock (this issue) on two grounds that we regard as specious, namely that we are either (a) political apologists for covert bigotry—the soft-on-racism charge raised by Sears (this issue) or (b) psychological naïfs who cling to obsolete definitions of attitudes and prejudice—the scientific incompetence charge raised by both Banaji, Nosek, and Greenwald (this issue) and Wittenbrink (this issue). To move the debate beyond such caricatures, the scholarly community must eventually confront the specific empirical objections that Arkes and Tetlock raised about how construct-validational work is done (whether researchers are giving fair weight to ideologically dissonant alternative explanations) and the specific logical objections that Arkes and Tetlock raise about the blurring of fact-value distinctions (whether psychological theory is advanced by researchers’ opining on the political defensibility of their research participants’ opinions).