Scott Alexander, curated
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Bogus Pipeline, Bona Fide Pipeline

Quality
71
Strong
Claude Shift
38
Slight
RWI
2
of 10

Follow-up reading

The Implicit Association Test — next-day continuation · Mar 2009

Summary

An explainer of two techniques psychologists use to get past people's self-flattering self-reports, setting up the IAT post. The Bogus Pipeline is a fake lie detector: convince subjects a gleaming machine reads minds (by 'catching' answers that differ from a secretly-copied earlier survey), and they give markedly less self-enhancing, more factually-accurate answers — and via the Marlowe-Crowne scale (Millham & Kellogg), it lets you estimate how much self-enhancement is self-deception vs deliberate lying. The Bona Fide Pipeline is the opposite: an unassuming computer task that hides that it's measuring you, using face primes plus a good-word/bad-word reaction-time game to read implicit racial associations (Fazio 1995), which correlated with a black experimenter's rated interaction quality. Closes pointing to the IAT as its 'Harvard-educated cousin.'

Why this score

Quality 71 · Strong. Strong-ish explainer — clear and informative, anchored by the genuinely clever Bogus-Pipeline concept and the self-deception-vs-lying decomposition. Held at low-Strong as a setup post curating others' techniques (and the Bona-Fide-Pipeline half sits in the later-contested implicit-measure literature).

Claude’s paradigm shift 38 · Slight. Moderate — reports established techniques (Bogus Pipeline from the 1970s, Fazio's 1995 measure); the value is lucid exposition.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A clear explainer of two self-report-bypassing techniques (the Bogus Pipeline fake lie-detector; the Bona Fide Pipeline) and the self-deception-vs-deliberate-lying decomposition, setting up the IAT work. Conceptual/expository influence within rationalist discourse, no material change — low RWI.