Some psychologists aim to secure a role for psychological explanations in understanding contemporary social disparities, a concern that plays out in debates over the relevance of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Meta-analysts disagree about the predictive validity of the IAT and about the importance of implicit attitudes in explaining racial disparities. Here, I use the IAT to articulate and explore one route to establishing the relevance of psychological attitudes with small effects: an appeal to a process of “accumulation” that aggregates small effects into large harms. After characterizing mechanisms of accumulation and considering some candidate examples, I argue that such mechanisms suggest how a contemporary attitude with small effects could figure in the explanation of large disparities, but they do not vindicate the importance of such an attitude since such mechanisms are typically also determined by competing causes. I close by sketching several strategies for advancing a defense of the relevance of attitudes with small effects.

一些心理学家的目的是确保心理学解释在理解当代社会差距方面发挥作用，这种担忧在关于内隐联想测验（IAT）的相关性的辩论中表现出来。荟萃分析人士不同意IAT的预测有效性以及内隐态度在解释种族差异方面的重要性。在这里，我使用IAT来阐明和探索建立具有小影响的心理态度的相关性的一种方法：呼吁“积累”过程，将小影响聚合为大危害。在描述了积累机制并考虑了一些候选示例之后，我认为这种机制表明了如何在解释大的差异时体现出具有小影响的当代态度，但是它们并没有证明这种态度的重要性，因为这种机制通常也是由竞争原因决定的。最后，我概述了几种策略，这些策略可以以较小的影响力来捍卫态度的相关性。