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)
Articles
- In Defense of Explicit Bias: On the Comprehensive and Costly Fiction That We Did Not Already Know — The bias is not implicit. It has never been implicit. The dishonesty is in pretending we are surprised to find it.