Public Profile

The Wexler Institute for Implicit Cognition Studies is an independent research organization affiliated, by way of a sequence of grants and a shared parking lot, with a major university in eastern Massachusetts whose name the Institute prefers not to invoke in its official communications. Founded in 2006 with a foundational gift from the estate of the late Lillian Tessler Wexler — a New Bedford textile heiress who had become, in her final decade, a convert to the proposition that her grandchildren did not like her for reasons they were not themselves aware of — the Institute has, in the two decades since, established itself as the preeminent American center for the laboratory study of attitudes that subjects do not realize they hold.

The Institute’s signature instrument, the Wexler Latent Attitudes Inventory, is a millisecond-response word-and-image association task widely deployed in academic, governmental, and corporate settings, and is the subject of more than four hundred peer-reviewed publications and an undisclosed but considerable volume of consulting engagements. The Institute also operates the Tessler Center for Predictive Disposition Studies, the Mertz-Halbritter Annual Symposium on Latent Cognition, and a quarterly journal, The Inventory, whose subscribers include thirty-one federal agencies and the human resources departments of forty-eight Fortune 500 corporations.

The Institute is directed by Dr. Hadley Vermeer-Schultz, who joined the organization in 2012 from the psychology department of the University of Pennsylvania. Its endowment, last reported at $187 million, is administered by a board of trustees including three former cabinet secretaries, a retired chief diversity officer of a major commercial bank, and the founding partner of a Boston consultancy that contracts with the Institute for the licensing of its training modules. The Institute publishes annual disclosures of its research funding, which it characterizes as “substantially independent of commercial interest.”

Critics — predominantly drawn from the philosophical and statistical wings of the academy, and one from the Letters page of this newspaper — have raised methodological objections to the Institute’s signature instrument, including the contention that its test-retest reliability is lower than the test-retest reliability of a coin. The Institute has responded to these objections in twenty-three published papers, the cumulative thesis of which is that the objections themselves reflect implicit attitudes toward the work.

The Institute’s motto, adopted at its founding and rendered in Latin on its letterhead, is Quod non scis te scire: “What you do not know that you know.”

Notable Publications

  • Toward a Predictive Architecture of Attitudinal Latency (Vermeer-Schultz, 2019)
  • The Inventory at Twenty: Validity, Critique, and the Next Generation of Instruments (Institute Press, 2024)
  • Disposition Beneath Speech: Studies in the Millisecond Register (Vermeer-Schultz & Halbritter, 2021)

Private Profile

The Institute is, in the broadest sense, a laboratory built around a single methodological claim — that the trustworthy register of human opinion is faster than speech — and an enormous commercial apparatus built around the corollary that the discovery of one’s true attitudes requires expert administration. It has the prestige of an Ivy adjunct, the budget of a midsize consultancy, and the methodological doubts of a discipline that has spent fifteen years quietly revising its replication estimates downward without revising its training-module pricing in either direction. Its researchers are, on the whole, sincere; its consulting subsidiary, on the whole, is not. The two divisions are kept on separate floors of the same building, which the staff calls, without irony, “the Wall.”

The Institute’s relationship to its critics is one of patient condescension. It does not engage with statistical objections in public; it commissions further studies. It does not engage with philosophical objections at all, on the grounds that they are not empirical. It has, by a process so gradual that even its own faculty have not entirely registered it, become the kind of organization whose principal product is not knowledge but certification — the issuance, on letterhead, of the assurance that a given corporation’s employees have been trained, audited, and re-tested at intervals consistent with the Institute’s published standards, which the Institute also publishes.

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