For decades, millions used a website to test their biases. Now, funding has dried up as Trump targets DEI programs

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Project Implicit is a simple website that invites people to take online tests that analyze their attitudes toward people of other races, ethnic backgrounds or genders, or on issues like health and artificial intelligence. The project aims to understand hidden cognitive processes that shape judgment and behavior. Millions of people have taken their tests, and for decades, the resulting data has been a treasure trove of information for researchers.

When psychologist Calvin Lai wanted to study how people can learn to be less prejudiced against people of other races, he asked researchers to send in their best ideas. He and his team tested these ideas with studies on 17,000 people, which is a huge sample for a psychology study.

Lai was able to accomplish this research because of Project Implicit.

“We can answer bigger questions that you can kind of only answer through scale in a way that you can’t really answer anywhere else,” he said, adding that the site is one of the largest for collecting psychology data online.

He and his co-authors concluded in 2016 that despite the best ideas from researchers, there was no consistent way to reduce people’s racial preferences.

Lai, who is now an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, continues to do research using Project Implicit data.

Now, that data well could dry up as funding for the project is under threat due to the Trump administration’s targeting of programs that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, also known as DEI, which includes the kind of training sessions the team used to offer. Only a few days into his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending DEI programs within the federal government and his administration has looked to cut research funding to programs that include DEI initiatives.

Funding for the site comes from schools, companies and government departments that hire the scientists to teach sessions about the science of implicit bias. The team behind the site is asking for donations for the first time, but say that regardless, this will mean scaling back on studies about bias.

“The studies that have been run at Project Implicit are studies that you cannot run anywhere else. And in many ways, they have informed our understanding of how cultural attitudes about things like race and gender have changed over time,” Lai said.

Social and developmental psychologist Ryan Lei also uses Project Implicit for his research. He’s an associate professor of psychology at Haverford College and specializes in studying how children learn about the social world, including how they develop biases.

He said that a new direction for research is looking at how implicit biases can vary among people of different areas, and Project Implicit data can help because there is enough data on people around the U.S. who took the tests.

However, now that the website needs to find other ways of funding their operations, he said researchers will have to volunteer their time to prepare data for other scientists to use. That will slow down the research process, and their work on testing new ideas, such as a test for implicit biases based on people’s social class.

“That takes time and energy and effort in order to create and validate and put up. It just means that those initiatives might get shelved or delayed.”

Despite the Trump administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion, there are still a lot of people interested in taking the tests on the Project Implicit site, said Kate Ratliff, a social psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, who is also on the board of Project Implicit and used to be the group’s executive director.

“Over the years we see ebb and flow in terms of participant traffic of people coming to the websites and completing our tests and taking part in our research,” she said. “We’re still averaging well over a million people a year, so even with the ebb and flows … so I think there is still reason to think that people are interested in taking part in project implicit research studies.”

Some scientists have been critical of how useful the implicit association test is as a measure of implicit bias over the years. Ratliff said a lot of the criticism, or studies looking at the limitations of the test, also use data from Project Implicit.

She said the group has two full-time employees: an executive director who coordinated training sessions for organizations that wanted them, and a programmer in charge of website maintenance and data quality. At the current rate, the group can keep those employees for a few more months.