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Race, weapons, and the perception of threat
Abstract
Two decades of research have documented a robust racial bias in the perceptual identification of weapons and the decision to shoot in laboratory simulations. In this chapter, we review the advances that have been made in understanding the causes, correlates, and psychological processes contributing to race biases in threat perception across different experimental paradigms. We begin by offering a psychological definition of bias, and considering how it may differ from folk concepts of bias. We discuss the contributions of this work to the broader field of implicit attitudes research. Most implicit bias research uses experimental tasks as measures of underlying attitudes. In contrast, research on racial bias in threat perception has focused on biased behaviors rather than attitudes. As a result, progress has been made in understanding not only automatic threat reactions but also the cognitive control processes that moderate the expression of automatic reactions in overt behavior. This literature has helped integrate research on implicit bias with research on executive control in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Moreover, this research has served as a test bed for developing quantitative models of social biases, including the use of signal detection theory, multinomial models, and diffusion models. We discuss the relationships among these different classes of models, and what each can contribute to understanding biased threat detection. We consider the complexities in linking findings from well-controlled laboratory experiments to field studies on actual police use of force. We end by considering questions about the rationality of racial biases, and argue that the rationality of a behavior cannot be understood as an empirical question apart from normative judgments of the behavior.
... Unintentional discrimination, then, involves unintentionally responding to facts that, in light of your end, amounts to treating a person unfairly or unfavorably in virtue of their membership of a certain social group. In the shooter task for example (see, e.g., Payne & Correll, 2020), the task or end of the participants was to shoot people that pose immanent threat, i.e., the ones holding a weapon. The findings show that people responded to a fact that amounted to unfair treatment: the skin color of the persons. ...
... My proposal to understand implicit bias as unintentional discrimination, then, implies casting a wider net. We should not merely focus on the unintentional responses that are measured by means of the IAT or the shooter task for example, responses of which participants even turn out to be conscious or are able to become conscious of (see, e.g., Gawronski et al., 2006;Payne & Correll, 2020; see also Reis-Dennis & Yao, 2021), but also pay attention to unintentional and unconscious discrimination that takes place within or that are implied in actions that are conscious and intentional under a different description. ...
... What is more, if we, as they and others suggest (see De Houwer, 2019; Payne & Correll, 2020), let go of the distinction between discrimination, understood as unfair and unfavorable treatment, and discrimination in a neutral sense, shooting a person who is threatening with a weapon is discrimination as well, and so is choosing a candidate who has the right credentials. Every decision in which we use facts about a person to distinguish or make a choice would count as discrimination. ...
In this paper, I argue that instead of primarily paying attention to the nature of implicit attitudes that are taken to cause implicit discrimination, we should investigate how discrimination can be implicit in itself. I propose to characterize implicit discrimination as unintentional discrimination: the person responds to facts unintentionally and often unconsciously which are, given their end, irrelevant and imply unfair treatment. The result is a unified account of implicit bias that allows for the different ways in which it can display itself and can be explained. Furthermore, the view can account for the central characteristics of implicit bias: (1) that it is, for a variety of reasons, difficult to control, (2) that we are not necessarily unconscious of implicit bias but not properly conscious either, and (3) that we can unintentionally discriminate regardless of whether we claim to care about fairness.
... We recognize the article addresses methodological challenges identified in previous studies with mixed results (Mekawi & Bresin, 2015;Payne & Correll, 2020). However, although the authors may improve on the validity of previous laboratory-based methods, they fail to illustrate the external and ecological validity of their current approach. ...
... Shooting bias in police use of force is measured and operationalized in a variety of ways in policing research, including the occurrence of errors, timing, and shooting threshold among others (Payne & Correll, 2020). Although Andersen et al. (2023) prioritize the occurrence of racial errors as the only measure of shooting bias, research suggests occurrence of these errors is not related to bias in police use of force (Payne & Correll, 2020). ...
... Shooting bias in police use of force is measured and operationalized in a variety of ways in policing research, including the occurrence of errors, timing, and shooting threshold among others (Payne & Correll, 2020). Although Andersen et al. (2023) prioritize the occurrence of racial errors as the only measure of shooting bias, research suggests occurrence of these errors is not related to bias in police use of force (Payne & Correll, 2020). In the meta-analysis of racial bias shooting task studies by Mekawi and Bresin (2015), the authors similarly did not find a main effect for shooting errors, but they did for reaction time and shooting threshold. ...
Andersen et al. (2021) ont publié dans cette revue un article en anglais portant sur les préjugés raciaux et l’usage erroné de force mortelle parmi les policiers du Canada. Ils y exploraient le lien possible entre l’usage erroné de force mortelle dans une épreuve de tir simulée à des fins de nouvelle attestation, la physiologie du stress et la race du suspect (noire c. blanche). Ne constatant aucun lien entre les résultats au Test d’association implicite Noirs – Blancs et les erreurs de tir à l’épreuve, ils ont conclu à tort que le Test n’était pas valide en tant qu’outil de sélection pour évaluer l’usage de la force basé sur des préjugés raciaux et qu’il n’était donc pas utile. Cet article passe en revue les lacunes méthodologiques, les hypothèses tendancieuses et les erreurs de logique des auteurs, puis discute d’une démarche informée pour comprendre les préjugés raciaux et la violence policière. Il contient aussi un appel à l’action pour l’adoption de démarches antiracistes dans les revues universitaires.
... Our analysis of IB is based on a behavioral definition of bias as the effect of social category cues (e.g., cues used to construct racial and gender categories) on behavioral responses. This definition is based on the notion that bias should be conceived of as a behavioral phenomenon that needs to be explained rather than a "thing" that people have that would explain their biased behavior (see De Houwer, 2019; Payne & Correll, 2020). As we noted in our target article, explanations of the latter type can easily become circular when (1) biased behavior is explained by the proposition that people have bias and (2) the bias people are presumed to have is inferred from the biased behavior that needs to be explained (see Cervone et al., 2001;Fleeson & Jayawickreme, 2021;Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2015). ...
... Unconscious and unintentional bias. The significance of the difference between unconscious and unintentional bias can be illustrated with a central question in research on racial bias in police officers' decision to shoot, reflected in a tendency to more frequently shoot at unarmed Black targets compared to unarmed White targets (for a review, see Payne & Correll, 2020). One potential interpretation of this difference is that it reflects an unintentional effect of social category cues on response selection, involving an impulsive tendency to pull the trigger in response to Black but not White targets, which could be suppressed given sufficient time and mental resources. ...
... The target object is replaced by a masking stimulus and participants are asked to indicate whether the target object was a gun or a harmless object. A common finding in the WIT is that participants misidentify harmless objects more frequently as guns when they were primed with a Black face than when they are primed with a White face (for a review, see Payne & Correll, 2020). Integrating an opportunity for reflection and error correction in the WIT, Payne et al. (2005) found that participants almost always corrected their initial errors, suggesting that racial bias in weapon identification is driven by unintentional effects of social category cues, not unconscious effects. ...
We are pleased about the considerable interest in our target article and that there is overwhelming agreement with our central thesis that, if the term implicit is understood as unconscious in reference to bias, implicit bias (IB) should not be equated with bias on implicit measures (BIM). We are also grateful for the insightful commentaries, which continue to advance the field’s thinking on this topic. The comments inspired us to think further about the relation between IB and BIM as well as the implications of a clear distinction between the two. In the current reply, we build on these comments, respond to some critical questions, and clarify some arguments that were insufficiently clear in our target article.
... A large body of work exploring mechanisms underlying police attitudes and behavior during police-civilian interactions typically focus on anti-Black bias as a source of violent outcomes (e.g., Correll et al., 2007;Payne & Correll, 2020;Plant & Peruche, 2005). This work generally posits that stereotypes linking Black with danger underlie the "shooter bias" (a propensity in laboratory studies for participants [often including Police] to more frequently shoot unarmed Black compared to White men; Correll et al., 2002Correll et al., , 2007. ...
... Research on police-civilian interactions typically centers on the role of racial bias in officers' decisions to use lethal force. Despite making up only 13% of the United States population, Black individuals represent 26% of police shooting victims, implying a racial disparity in the use of force (Payne & Correll, 2020). This pattern is studied in the laboratory using "shooter" type behavioral tasks (e.g., Correll et al., 2002;Greenwald et al., 2003;Plant & Peruche, 2005). ...
... Decades of research on the "shooter bias" detail the role of implicit bias in driving police behavior during policecivilian encounters (Payne & Correll, 2020). Despite this, almost no research has examined similar processes from the perspective of civilians (cf. ...
The role of implicit processes during police-civilian encounters is well studied from the perspective of the police. Decades of research on the “shooter bias” suggests that implicit Black-danger associations potentiate the perception of threat of Black individuals, leading to a racial bias in the decision to use lethal force. Left understudied are civilians’ possible associations of police with danger and how such associations pervade behavior and explicit views of the police. The current work begins to address this gap. In two within-subjects studies, we separately assess police-threat (i.e., safety/danger) and police-valence (i.e., good/bad) associations as well as their relative influences on explicit perceptions of police. Study 1 revealed that implicit threat evaluations (police-danger associations) more strongly predicted negative explicit views of the police compared to implicit valence evaluations (police-negative associations). Study 2 replicated these findings and suggests that individuals evaluate the police as more dangerous versus negative when each response is pitted against each other within single misattribution procedure trials. The possible implications for explicit attitudes toward police reform and behavior during police-civilian encounters are discussed.
... Racial stereotypes pervade modern thinking, with abundant experimental evidence more strongly linking Black versus White people with weapons (Payne & Correll, 2020). In the weapon identification task (WIT), for example, participants are usually better (i.e., faster and more accurate) at identifying guns and worse at identifying harmless objects (e.g., tools, toys) after seeing Black versus White face primes (Amodio et al., 2004;Payne, 2001;Todd et al., 2016). ...
... Furthermore, emotion expressions presumably signal affect and intentions (Niedenthal & Brauer, 2012;Todorov et al., 2008) in ways that demographic cues may not, making them informative for basic social judgment (e.g., identifying threats). Accordingly, emotion expressions may garner substantial attention in threat-related contexts like weapon identification, effectively competing against the attention often garnered by race in such contexts (Payne & Correll, 2020). Indeed, the mere availability of scowls and smiles has been found to affect racially biased weapon identification (Kubota & Ito, 2014), whereas the mere availability of other information (e.g., age cues) has not (Todd et al., 2016). ...
Racial stereotypes are commonly activated by informational cues that are detectable in people’s faces. Here, we used a sequential priming task to examine whether and how the salience of emotion (angry/scowling vs. happy/smiling expressions) or apparent race (Black vs. White) information in male face primes shapes racially biased weapon identification (gun vs. tool) decisions. In two experiments (Ntotal = 546) using two different manipulations of facial information salience, racial bias in weapon identification was weaker when the salience of emotion expression versus race was heightened. Using diffusion decision modeling, we tested competing accounts of the cognitive mechanism by which the salience of facial information moderates this behavioral effect. Consistent support emerged for an initial bias account, whereby the decision process began closer to the “gun” response upon seeing faces of Black versus White men, and this racially biased shift in the starting position was weaker when emotion versus race information was salient. We discuss these results vis-à-vis prior empirical and theoretical work on how facial information salience moderates racial bias in decision-making.
... Similarly, exemplar-based threat ratings showed that participants perceived Arab faces as more threatening than White faces and this pattern did not differ between police and 4 In the preregistration, we predicted that we would not observe effects in errors or response criterion. These hypothesis formulations were based on the assumption that using a longer response time window in the FPST would shift effects from error rates into reaction times, comparable to a speed-accuracy tradeoff (e.g., Payne & Correll, 2020). However, meta-analytic evidence by Mekawi et al. (2015) suggests that this assumption is false. ...
... Consequently, FPST and self-report measures may capture different psychological processes. Third, relationships between self-report measures and shooter biases might be attenuated by low reliability due to high measurement error of the FPST (Payne & Correll, 2020). Taken together, several explanations might account for the fact that individual differences in intergroup contact experiences, stereotype endorsement, attitudes, dehumanization, and social dominance orientation do not correlate with the shooter bias. ...
The present research assesses potential correlates of discriminatory police behavior, comparing police and civilian participants’ in a first person shooter task (FPST) as well as on various self-report measures of intergroup contact, intergroup attitudes, and ideological beliefs in three preregistered studies. Study 1 (N = 330), using a FPST with a short response window (630 ms), did not observe shooter biases in reaction times, error rates and signal detection parameters in neither police nor civilian participants. Study 2a (N = 290), using a longer response window (850 ms), observed a shooter bias in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in both civilian and police participants. These shooter biases were largely driven by faster reactions, fewer errors, and less hesitant shoot decisions for armed Arab (vs. White) targets. Study 2b (N = 191; 850 ms response window) closely replicated shooter biases in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in a sample of civilian online participants. Across all studies, we observed similar results in the shooter task for police and civilian samples. Furthermore, both police and civilian participants expressed anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attitudes across a variety of self-report measures. However, compared to civilians, police participants reported higher levels of anti-Muslim attitudes on some measures as well as higher levels of social dominance orientation, which might pose additional risk factors for discriminatory behavior. Lastly, while we observed reliable individual differences in self-reported intergroup attitudes, ideologies, and intergroup contact, none of these characteristics correlated with shooter biases.
... Although use of the term has been criticized as delusive (Corneille & Hütter, 2020), its meaning is actually very clear when it serves as a qualifier of bias. From a purely behavioral point of view, bias can be defined as the effect of social category cues (e.g., cues related to race, gender, etc.) on behavioral responses (De Houwer, 2019;Payne & Correll, 2020). 2 Expanding on this definition, instances of bias can be described as explicit if respondents are aware of the effect of specific social 1 Our use of the phrase effect of social category cues on behavioral responses should not be taken to mean that the source or cause of a dominant group member's racist or sexist behavior is located within a marginalized group member (see Fields & Fields, 2014). ...
... An important aspect of this definition is that it treats IB as a behavioral phenomenon that needs to be explained-not as a "thing" people have that would explain their behavior, as suggested by the way the term is sometimes used in academic and non-academic writings (for complementary critiques, see Daumeyer, Rucker, & Richeson, 2017;Salter, Adams, & Perez, 2013). De Houwer (2019) discussed several advantages of such a behavioral definition of implicit bias (see also Payne & Correll, 2020). For the purpose of the current analysis, one of the most significant advantages is that it avoids explanatory circularity (De Houwer, Gawronski, & Barnes-Holmes, 2013). ...
People can behave in a biased manner without being aware that their behavior is biased, an idea commonly referred to as implicit bias. Research on implicit bias has been heavily influenced by implicit measures, in that implicit bias is often equated with bias on implicit measures. Drawing on a definition of implicit bias as an unconscious effect of social category cues on behavioral responses, the current article argues that the widespread equation of implicit bias and bias on implicit measures is problematic on conceptual and empirical grounds. A clear separation of the two constructs will: (1) resolve ambiguities arising from the multiple meanings implied by current terminological conventions; (2) stimulate new research by uncovering important questions that have been largely ignored; (3) provide a better foundation for theories of implicit bias through greater conceptual precision; and (4) highlight the broader significance of implicit bias in a manner that is not directly evident from bias on implicit measures.
... For example, in studies on recognition memory, how well can people distinguish words that have been presented in a prior task from words that have not been presented before (Snodgrass & Corwin, 1988)? In studies on racial bias in weapon identification, how well can people distinguish weapons from nonthreatening objects (Payne & Correll, 2020)? Applied to fake news, how well can people discern fake news from real news? ...
... Another valuable aspect of adopting an SDT framework in research on the identification of fake news is that it provides conceptual links to other areas that may inform broader theorizing on judgment and decisionmaking. In the introduction, we mentioned research on recognition memory (Snodgrass & Corwin, 1988) and racial bias in weapon identification (Payne & Correll, 2020). Other examples are studies that have used SDT to quantify discrimination sensitivity and responses biases in the illusory truth effect (e.g., Unkelbach, 2007) and eyewitness identification (e.g., Wixted et al., 2016). ...
Research across many disciplines seeks to understand how misinformation spreads with a view towards limiting its impact. One important question in this research is how people determine whether a given piece of news is real or fake. The current article discusses the value of Signal Detection Theory (SDT) in disentangling two distinct aspects in the identification of fake news: (1) ability to accurately distinguish between real news and fake news and (2) response biases to judge news as real versus fake regardless of news veracity. The value of SDT for understanding the determinants of fake news beliefs is illustrated with reanalyses of existing data sets, providing more nuanced insights into how partisan bias, cognitive reflection, and prior exposure influence the identification of fake news. Implications of SDT for the use of source-related information in the identification of fake news, interventions to improve people's skills in detecting fake news, and the debunking of misinformation are discussed.
... However, if participants are more likely to respond "gun" after seeing a Black face compared to a white face, this will only shift the criterion (Payne et al., 2005;Klauer and Voss, 2008). Some research suggests that, at least with respect to the gun/tool task, there are no perceptual effects (Klauer and Voss, 2008;Burke, 2015;Payne and Correll, 2020). Future research, however, could apply this paradigm to face and emotion perception. ...
Hierarchical predictive processing provides a framework outlining how prior expectations shape perception and cognition. Here, we highlight hierarchical predictive processing as a framework for explaining how social context and group-based social knowledge can directly shape intergroup perception. More specifically, we argue that hierarchical predictive processing confers a uniquely valuable toolset to explain extant findings and generate novel hypotheses for intergroup perception. We first provide an overview of hierarchical predictive processing, specifying its primary theoretical assumptions. We then review evidence showing how prior knowledge influences intergroup perception. Next, we outline how hierarchical predictive processing can account well for findings in the intergroup perception literature. We then underscore the theoretical strengths of hierarchical predictive processing compared to other frameworks in this space. We finish by outlining future directions and laying out hypotheses that test the implications of hierarchical predictive processing for intergroup perception and intergroup cognition more broadly. Taken together, hierarchical predictive processing provides explanatory value and capacity for novel hypothesis generation for intergroup perception.
... So sind Einflüsse von Stereotypen wahrscheinlicher, wenn Personen emotional erregt (z. B. gestresst, ängstlich) sind oder unter Zeitdruck stehen (Correll et al., 2014;Fazio, 1990;Payne & Correll, 2020 (Paluck et al., 2021), wobei deren Wirksamkeit nicht vorausgesetzt werden kann, sondern stets auch systematisch empirisch überprüft werden sollte (Paluck, 2009). ...
Im ersten Teil des vorliegenden Kapitels wird zunächst beschrieben, wie Menschen sich selbst und andere in Gruppen einteilen (soziale Kategorisierung) und diese Gruppen mit bestimmten Eigenschaften verbinden (Stereotype). Anschließend werden theoretische Ansätze zur Entwicklung von Stereotypen im Kindesalter dargelegt. Im zweiten Teil des Kapitels werden Forschungsergebnisse zu sozialer Kategorisierung und Stereotypen bei jungen Kindern (vom Säuglingsalter bis zum Grundschulübergang) zusammengefasst. Der dritte Teil fokussiert die Aktivierung und Anwendung von Stereotypen. Es werden Ansätze dargestellt, die erklären, wann Stereotype eher einen Einfluss auf das Verhalten haben, und es wird herausgearbeitet, unter welchen Umständen Stereotypisierung in Kindertagesstätten und Kindergärten wahrscheinlich ist. Im vierten Teil werden verschiedene Ansätze zur Reduzierung von Stereotypen, Vorurteilen und Diskriminierung dargestellt und es werden Befunde zur Wirksamkeit von Interventionen diskutiert. Exemplarisch wird im fünften Teil eine Intervention (die Prejudice Habit-Breaking Intervention) vorgestellt und mit praktischen Anwendungsbeispielen im Kontext Kindergarten und Kindertagesstätte illustriert. Zuletzt findet sich eine praxisorientierte Kurzzusammenfassung der Hauptinhalte des Kapitels für pädagogische Fachkräfte.
... Some implicit measures are less flexible in their range of applications, in that they have been designed to measure responses that are highly content-specific. Two examples are the weapon identification task (Payne 2001) and the shooter task (Correll et al., 2002), which have been designed to measure racial bias in weapon identification and decisions to shoot (for a review, see Payne & Correll, 2020). In the weapon identification task, participants are briefly presented with either a Black or a White face prime, which is immediately followed by a target picture showing either a gun or a harmless object. ...
Various areas in psychology are interested in whether specific processes underlying judgments and behavior operate in an automatic or non-automatic fashion. In social psychology, valuable insights can be gained from evidence on whether and how judgments and behavior under suboptimal processing conditions differ from judgments and behavior under optimal processing conditions. In personality psychology, valuable insights can be gained from individual differences in behavioral tendencies under optimal and suboptimal processing conditions. The current chapter provides a method-focused overview of different features of automaticity (i.e., unintentionality, efficiency, uncontrollability, unconsciousness), how these features can be studied empirically, and pragmatic issues in research on automaticity. Expanding on this overview, the chapter describes the procedures of extant implicit measures and the value of implicit measures for studying automatic processes in judgments and behavior. The chapter concludes with a discussion of pragmatic issues in research using implicit measures.
... Most White Americans' experience with Black Americans is largely indirect, through media that are themselves riddled with stereotypic biases [34,35]. The 'rubbish in, rubbish out' principle applies: a cognitive system that forms associations based on statistical regularities will be systematically biased, so long as it operates in an environment that is characterized by pre-existing stereotypes and inequalities [36]. ...
Implicit bias refers to automatically evoked mental associations about social groups. The idea has been influential across the social sciences as a way to explain persistent racial disparities amid changing self-report attitudes. Most research has treated implicit bias as an individual attitude. However, evidence suggests that it is neither a stable individual difference nor a strong correlate of individual behavior. Moreover, the individual-focused approach can lead researchers to neglect systemic racism as a cause of persistent disparities. We argue that implicit bias can be considered a cognitive reflection of systemic racism in the environment. In this view, implicit bias is an ongoing set of associations based on inequalities and stereotypes in the environment. As such, implicit bias changes when contexts change.
Стаття присвячена розгляду науково-прикладних положень, що обґрунтовуються в такому новому науковому напрямку, як психологічна армалогія. Зазначено, що психологічна армалогія покликана вирішувати проблеми психологічного відбору осіб, яким дозволяється вільне придбання, володіння, зберігання та носіння вогнепальної зброї. Вирішення такої проблеми буде сприяти консолідації українського суспільства й особливо у контексті реальних загроз, що пов’язані з теперішньою російською агресією, та можливими її загарбницькими викликами у майбутньому. З’ясовано, щонатепер існує два підходи у ставленні до озброєння громадян, що один іншого заперечують. Підхід вільного доступу до вогнепальної зброї та підхід заборони вільного доступу до зброї. Прихильники першого підходу наголошують на тому, що громадяни мають право себе захищати від існуючих загроз, коли держава та її правоохоронні інституції не спроможні надавати ефективний захист. Прихильники другого підходу вважають, що це може призвести до трагічних наслідків, оскільки серед громадян завжди будуть ті, хто неспроможні поводити себе відповідально. Примирити ці підходи й покликана психологічна армалогія, яка через розуміння відмінностей підходів у дискусії про зброю, в рамках соціально-психологічних досліджень, може посприяти усуненню непорозумінь щодо ефективної мінімізації страху та одночасної максимізації особистої та громадської безпеки. Ключові слова: агресія, безпека, віктимність, зброя, ефект зброї, насилля, психологічна армалогія, психологічний відбір, психопатія.
Hate speech comprises any form of hateful or contemptuous expression that attacks, degrades, or vilifies people based on their social identities. This Element focuses on hate speech targeting social identities that are devalued by a society's dominant groups, and that is likely to evoke, promote, or legitimize harms such violence, discrimination, and oppression. After detailing the ways in which hate speech is expressed (e.g., through derogatory labels, metaphors, offensive imagery), the production of hate speech is explored at theindividual level (e.g., prejudiced attitudes), group level (e.g., realistic intergroup threat), and societal level (e.g., hierarchy maintenance; free speech protections). A discussion of the effects of blatant and anonymous hate speech on targets (e.g., anxiety and depression) and nontargets (e.g., stereotype activation; desensitization; fomenting violence) follows. Finally, the effectiveness of mitigation efforts isexplored, including use of computer-based technologies, speech codes, confrontation, and counterspeech.
Black Americans are arrested at disproportionate levels compared with White Americans. We sought to understand whether the association between psychopathology and arrest record is equally strong for Black Americans and White Americans, hypothesizing that the association would be stronger for Black Americans. In a sample of adults (age: M = 34.81 years), we found that at the same level of psychopathology severity, emotion dysregulation, and impulsivity, Black Americans ( n = 585) exhibited higher rates of being arrested in adulthood than White Americans ( n = 977). These findings held even when controlling for environmental (e.g., socioeconomic status) and individual (e.g., substance-use history) factors associated with arrests. This suggests that the risk conferred by more severe psychopathology on arrests is stronger for Black Americans than White Americans. Our results highlight how structural racism affects both psychopathology and the carceral system to contribute to the overrepresentation of Black Americans within the criminal justice system.
The present research assesses potential correlates of discriminatory police behavior, comparing police and civilian participants in a first person shooter task (FPST) as well as on various self-report measures of intergroup contact, intergroup attitudes, and ideological beliefs in three preregistered studies. Study 1 (N = 330), using a FPST with a short response window (630 ms), did not observe shooter biases in reaction times, error rates and signal detection parameters in neither police nor civilian participants. Study 2a (N = 290), using a longer response window (850 ms), observed a shooter bias in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in both civilian and police participants. These shooter biases were largely driven by faster reactions, fewer errors, and more liberal shoot decisions for armed Arab (vs. White) targets. Study 2b (N = 191; 850 ms response window) closely replicated shooter biases in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in a sample of civilian online participants. Across studies, we observed similar results in the shooter task for police and civilian samples. Furthermore, both police and civilian participants expressed anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attitudes across a variety of self-report measures. However, compared to civilians, police participants reported higher levels of anti-Muslim attitudes on some measures as well as higher levels of social dominance orientation, which might pose additional risk factors for discriminatory behavior. Lastly, while we observed reliable individual differences in self-reported intergroup attitudes, ideologies, and intergroup contact, none of these characteristics correlated with shooter biases.
Although most antiracism protests of 2020 were peaceful, at times, there was extreme use of force. Drawing on research that groups amplify intergroup threats, we test whether use of force is perceived as particularly justified against groups of Black people protesting racism. In Study 1, White Americans perceived a group of Black people peacefully protesting racism to be more threatening and more deserving of use of force than the same Black people protesting individually. Notably, when the protest topic did not threaten the racial hierarchy (i.e., environmental protection), Black groups (vs. individuals) no longer amplified perceived threat nor support for force. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that this tendency for groups to amplify intergroup threat was stronger among White Americans motivated to maintain the status quo (i.e., social conservatives). We conclude that Black groups protesting racism activate intergroup threats with implications for support for using force against them.
Recent advances in large-scale data collection have created new opportunities for psychological scientists who study intergroup bias. By leveraging big data, researchers can aggregate individual measures of intergroup bias into regional estimates to predict outcomes of consequence. This small-but-growing area of study has already impacted the field with well-powered research identifying relationships between regional intergroup biases and societally-important, ecologically-valid outcomes. In this chapter, we summarize existing regional intergroup bias research and review relevant theoretical perspectives. Next, we present new and recent evidence that cannot be explained by existing theory, and offer a new perspective on regional intergroup bias that highlights aggregation as changing its’ qualitative nature relative to individual intergroup bias. We conclude with a discussion of some of the important challenges that regional intergroup bias research will need to address in moving forward, focusing on issues of prediction and causality; constructs, measures, and data sources; and levels of analysis.
We endorse Cesario's call for more research into the complexities of “real-world” decisions and the comparative power of different causes of group disparities. Unfortunately, these reasonable suggestions are overshadowed by a barrage of non sequiturs, misdirected criticisms of methodology, and unsubstantiated claims about the assumptions and inferences of social psychologists.
A growing trend, reflected in the target article, effectively shifts control of prejudice operationalization to align with right-leaning priorities (and away from disadvantaged groups' voices and social justice). The article would only be compelling if experiments misaligned with real-world findings, if experimenters ignored nuances and moderators, and if the call to consider the social context included the macro-level societal context.
Are the landscapes of real-world decisions adequately represented in our laboratory tasks? Are the goals and expertise of experimental participants the same as real-world decision-makers? Are we neglecting crucial forces that lead to group outcomes? Are the contingencies necessary for producing experimental demonstrations of bias present in the real world? In the target article, I argued that the answers to these questions are needed to understand whether and how laboratory research can inform real-world group disparities. Most of the commentaries defending experimental social psychology neglected to directly address these main arguments. The commentaries defending implicit bias only revealed the inadequacy of this concept for explaining group disparities. The major conclusions from the target article remain intact, suggesting that experimental social psychology must undergo major changes to contribute to our understanding of group disparities.
In psychology, causal inference – both the transport from lab estimates to the real world and estimation on the basis of observational data – is often pursued in a casual manner. Underlying assumptions remain unarticulated; potential pitfalls are compiled in post-hoc lists of flaws. The field should move on to coherent frameworks of causal inference and generalizability that have been developed elsewhere.
Cesario argues that experiments cannot illuminate real group disparities because they leave out factors that operate in ordinary life. But what Cesario calls flaws are, in fact, the point of the experimental method. Of all the topics in science, we have to wonder why racial discrimination would be uniquely unsuited for investigating with experiments. The argument to give up the most powerful scientific method to study one of the hardest problems we confront is laughable.
Shortly after the alleged discovery of America and its vast expanse of land waiting to be cultivated with cash crops using cheap human labor, millions of Africans fell victims and were kidnapped to work as slaves in American plantations for about four centuries. Even though it has been over 150 years since the official abolition of slavery in America, the effects of the 400 years of enslavement continue to reverberate: irrespective of the blackletter rights protecting Black people from injustices, the deep racist structures typically decrease the potency of these rights, and thus perpetuate oppression. This article assesses the roles being played by race and profit in the administration of criminal justice: it deems the systemic oppression of Black people as a humanitarian crisis and seeks to ascertain this by interpreting the attitudes of the various key players in the American Criminal Justice System, the majoritarian population, mainstream media, and Corporate America: it challenges some entrenched racist practices suspected to be the umbilical cord that links Black people in America with mass incarceration.
Advances in mobile phone technology and social media have created a world where the volume of information generated and shared is outpacing the ability of humans to review and use that data. Machine learning (ML) models and “big data” analytical tools have the power to ease that burden by making sense of this information and providing insights that might not otherwise exist. In the context of international criminal and human rights law, ML is being used for a variety of purposes, including to uncover mass graves in Mexico, find evidence of homes and schools destroyed in Darfur, detect fake videos and doctored evidence, predict the outcomes of judicial hearings at the European Court of Human Rights, and gather evidence of war crimes in Syria. ML models are also increasingly being incorporated by States into weapon systems in order to better enable targeting systems to distinguish between civilians, allied soldiers and enemy combatants or even inform decision-making for military attacks.
The same technology, however, also comes with significant risks. ML models and big data analytics are highly susceptible to common human biases. As a result of these biases, ML models have the potential to reinforce and even accelerate existing racial, political or gender inequalities, and can also paint a misleading and distorted picture of the facts on the ground. This article discusses how common human biases can impact ML models and big data analytics, and examines what legal implications these biases can have under international criminal law and international humanitarian law.
The science behind implicit bias tests (e.g., Implicit Association Test) has become the target of increased criticism. However, policy-makers seeking to combat discrimination care about reducing bias in people's actual behaviors, not about changing a person's score on an implicit bias test. In line with this argument, we postulate that scientific controversies about implicit bias tests are irrelevant for anti-discrimination policy, which should instead focus on implicit bias in actual discriminatory behavior that occurs outside of awareness (in addition to instances of explicit bias). Two well-documented mechanisms can lead to implicit bias in actual discriminatory behavior: biased weighting and biased interpretation of information about members of particular social groups. The policy relevance of the two mechanisms is illustrated with their impact on hiring and promotion decisions, jury selection, and policing. Implications for education and bias intervention are discussed.
Using a simple videogame, the effect of ethnicity on shoot/ don't shoot decisions was examined. African American or White targets, holding guns or other objects, appeared in complex backgrounds. Participants were told to “shoot” armed targets and to “not shoot” unarmed targets. In Study 1, White participants made the correct decision to shoot an armed target more quickly if the target was African American than if he was White, but decided to “not shoot” an unarmed target more quickly if he was White. Study 2 used a shorter time window, forcing this effect into error rates. Study 3 replicated Study 1's effects and showed that the magnitude of bias varied with perceptions of the cultural stereotype and with levels of contact, but not with personal racial prejudice. Study 4 revealed equivalent levels of bias among both African American and White participants in a community sample. Implications and potential underlying mechanisms are discussed.
The content of spontaneously activated racial stereotypes among White Americans and the relation of this to more explicit measures of stereotyping and prejudice were investigated. Using a semantic priming paradigm, a prime was presented outside of conscious awareness (BLACK or WHITE), followed by a target stimulus requiring a word–nonword decision. The target stimuli included attributes that varied in valence and stereotypicality for Whites and African Americans. Results showed reliable stereotyping and prejudice effects: Black primes resulted in substantially stronger facilitation to negative than positive stereotypic attributes, whereas White primes facilitated positive more than negative stereotypic traits. The magnitude of this implicit prejudice effect correlated reliably with participants’ scores on explicit racial attitude measures, indicating that people's spontaneous stereotypic associations are consistent with their more controlled responses.
Social behavior is ordinarily treated as being under conscious (if not always thoughtful) control. However, considerable evidence now supports the view that social behavior often operates in an implicit or unconscious fashion. The identifying feature of implicit cognition is that past experience influences judgment in a fashion not introspectively known by the actor. The present conclusion—that attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes have important implicit modes of operation—extends both the construct validity and predictive usefulness of these major theoretical constructs of social psychology. Methodologically, this review calls for increased use of indirect measures—which are imperative in studies of implicit cognition. The theorized ordinariness of implicit stereotyping is consistent with recent findings of discrimination by people who explicitly disavow prejudice. The finding that implicit cognitive effects are often reduced by focusing judges’ attention on their judgment task provides a basis for evaluating applications (such as affirmative action) aimed at reducing such unintended discrimination.
Stereotypes linking Black Americans with guns can have life-altering outcomes, making it important to identify factors that shape such weapon identification biases and how they do so. We report 6 experiments that provide a mechanistic account of how category salience affects weapon identification bias elicited by male faces varying in race (Black, White) and age (men, boys). Behavioral analyses of error rates and response latencies revealed that, when race was salient, faces of Black versus White males (regardless of age) facilitated the classification of objects as guns versus tools. When a category other than race was salient, racial bias in behavior was reduced, though not eliminated. In Experiments 1–4, racial bias was weaker when participants attended to a social category besides race (i.e., age). In Experiments 5 and 6, racial bias was weaker when participants attended to an applicable, yet nonsubstantive category (i.e., the color of a dot on the face). Across experiments, process analyses using diffusion models revealed that, when race was salient, seeing Black versus White male faces led to an initial bias to favor the “gun” response. When a category besides race (i.e., age, dot color) was salient, racial bias in the relative start point was reduced, though not eliminated. These results suggest that the magnitude of racial bias in weapon identification may differ depending on what social category is salient. The collective findings also highlight the utility of diffusion modeling for elucidating how category salience shapes processes underlying racial biases in behavior.
Implicit bias is often viewed as a hidden force inside people that makes them perform inappropriate actions. This perspective can induce resistance against the idea that people are implicitly biased and complicates research on implicit bias. I put forward an alternative perspective that views implicit bias as a behavioral phenomenon. more specifically, it is seen as behavior that is automatically influenced by cues indicative of the social group to which others belong. This behavioral perspective is less likely to evoke resistance because implicit bias is seen as something that people do rather than possess and because it clearly separates the behavioral phenomenon from its normative implications. Moreover, performance on experimental tasks such as the Implicit Association Test is seen an instance of implicitly biased behavior rather than a proxy of hidden mental biases. Because these tasks allow for experimental control, they provide ideal tools for studying the automatic impact of social cues on behavior, for predicting other instances of biased behavior, and for educating people about implicitly biased behavior. The behavioral perspective not only changes the way we think about implicit bias but also shifts the aims of research on implicit bias and reveals links with other behavioral approaches such as network modeling.
The dual-attitude perspective posits that it is useful for research and theory to assume two distinct constructs: explicit and implicit attitudes (or automatic and deliberate evaluation). Much evidence supports this perspective, but some important tests are missing, casting doubts on studies that relied on the perspective for inference. We used a multimethod multitrait design to extensively test the validity of the dual perspective. The dataset (N = 24,015) included measurements of attitudes in 3 domains (race, politics, the self) with 7 indirect measures, and at least 3 self-report measures for each attitude domain. The dual-attitude model fit the data better than a single-attitude model. Six of the 7 indirect measures were related to the implicit construct more than to the explicit construct. The evidence supports the dual-attitude perspective, bolsters the validation of 6 indirect measures, and clears doubts from countless previous studies that used only one indirect measure to draw conclusions about implicit attitudes.
Four experiments examined the effect of proactive control on expressions of implicit racial bias. Whereas reactive control is engaged in response to a biasing influence (e.g., a stereotype, temptation, or distraction), proactive control is engaged in advance of such biases, functioning to strengthen task focus and, by consequence, limiting the affordance for a bias to be expressed in behavior. Using manipulations of response interference to modulate proactive control, proactive control was found to eliminate expressions of weapons bias, prejudice, and stereotyping on commonly used implicit assessments. Process dissociation analysis indicated that this pattern reflected changes in controlled processing but not automatic associations, as theorized, and assessments of neural activity, using event-related potentials, revealed that proactive control reduces early attention to task-irrelevant racial cues while increasing focus on task-relevant responses. Together, these results provide initial evidence for proactive control in social cognition and demonstrate its effectiveness at reducing expressions of implicit racial bias. Based on these findings and past research, we present a model of proactive and reactive control that offers a novel and generative perspective on self-regulation and prejudice reduction. (PsycINFO Database Record
Is there evidence of a Black–White disparity in death by police gunfire in the United States? This is commonly answered by comparing the odds of being fatally shot for Blacks and Whites, with odds benchmarked against each group’s population proportion. However, adjusting for population values has questionable assumptions given the context of deadly force decisions. We benchmark 2 years of fatal shooting data on 16 crime rate estimates. When adjusting for crime, we find no systematic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. Multiverse analyses showed only one significant anti-Black disparity of 144 possible tests. Exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for Blacks, at least when analyzing all shootings. For unarmed shootings or misidentification shootings, data are too uncertain to be conclusive.
This article challenges the highly intuitive assumption that prejudice should be less likely in public compared with private settings. It proposes that stereotypes may be conceptualized as a type of dominant response (C. L. Hull, 1943; R. B. Zajonc, 1965) whose expression may be enhanced in public settings, especially among individuals high in social anxiety. Support was found for this framework in an impression formation paradigm (Experiment 1) and in a speeded task designed to measure Stereotypic errors in perceptual identification (Experiment 2). Use of the process dissociation procedure (B. K. Payne, L. L. Jacoby, & A. J. Lambert, in press) demonstrated that these effects were due to decreases in cognitive control rather than increases in stereotype accessibility. The findings highlight a heretofore unknown and ironic consequence of anticipated public settings: Warning people that others may be privy to their responses may actually increase prejudice among the very people who are most worried about doing the wrong thing in public.
Although most research on the control of automatic prejudice has focused on the efficacy of deliberate attempts to suppress or correct for stereotyping, the reported experiments tested the hypothesis that automatic racial prejudice is subject to common social influence. In experiments involving actual interethnic contact, both tacit and expressed social influence reduced the expression of automatic prejudice, as assessed by two different measures of automatic attitudes. Moreover, the automatic social tuning effect depended on participant ethnicity. European Americans (but not Asian Americans) exhibited less automatic prejudice in the presence of a Black experimenter than a White experimenter (Experiments 2 and 4), although both groups exhibited reduced automatic prejudice when instructed to avoid prejudice (Experiment 3). Results are consistent with shared reality theory, which postulates that social regulation is central to social cognition.
Across two experiments, we examined whether implicit stereotypes linking younger (~28-year-old) Black versus White men with violence and criminality extend to older (~68-year-old) Black versus White men. In Experiment 1, participants completed a sequential priming task wherein they categorized objects as guns or tools after seeing briefly-presented facial images of men who varied in age (younger versus older) and race (Black versus White). In Experiment 2, we used different face primes of younger and older Black and White men, and participants categorized words as ‘threatening’ or ‘safe.’ Results consistently revealed robust racial biases in object and word identification: Dangerous objects and words were identified more easily (faster response times, lower error rates), and non-dangerous objects and words were identified less easily, after seeing Black face primes than after seeing White face primes. Process dissociation procedure analyses, which aim to isolate the unique contributions of automatic and controlled processes to task performance, further indicated that these effects were driven entirely by racial biases in automatic processing. In neither experiment did prime age moderate racial bias, suggesting that the implicit danger associations commonly evoked by younger Black versus White men appear to generalize to older Black versus White men.
Due to a lack of data, the demographic and psychological factors associated with lethal force by police officers have remained insufficiently explored. We develop the first predictive models of lethal force by integrating crowd-sourced and fact-checked lethal force databases with regional demographics and measures of geolocated implicit and explicit racial biases collected from 2,156,053 residents across the United States. Results indicate that only the implicit racial prejudices and stereotypes of White residents, beyond major demographic covariates, are associated with disproportionally more use of lethal force with Blacks relative to regional base rates of Blacks in the population. Thus, the current work provides the first macropsychological statistical models of lethal force, indicating that the context in which police officers work is significantly associated with disproportionate use of lethal force.
This article synthesizes the extant literature on the Weapons Identification Task (WIT), a sequential priming paradigm developed to investigate the impact of racial priming on identification of stereotype-congruent and stereotype-irrelevant objects. Given recent controversy over the replicability of and statistical power required to detect priming effects, the aim of this synthesis is to systematically assess the literature in order to develop recommendations for statistical power in future research with the WIT paradigm. To develop these recommendations, the present article first quantitatively ascertains the magnitude of publication bias in the extant literature. Next, expected effect sizes and power recommendations are generated from the extant literature. Finally, a close conceptual replication of the WIT paradigm is conducted to prospectively test these recommendations. Racial priming effects are detected in this prospective test providing increased confidence in the WIT priming effect and credibility to the proposed recommendations for power.
We expect a negative attitude in Germany against Muslims, based on the perceived close association of Islam and terrorism. The shooter task paradigm served as an attitude measure (Correll, Park, Judd & Wittenbrink, 2002); this task requests participants to make rapid decisions to shoot or not to shoot at armed and unarmed targets, respectively. Independent from actual target status (armed vs. unarmed), targets wore traditional Muslim headgear (Turban/Hijab). Participants showed a clear tendency to shoot more at targets wearing Muslim headgear than at the same targets wearing no headgear. In addition, participants rated each targets' likeability. These ratings showed greater likeability for targets with Muslim headgear. This result is discussed in light of attitudes' automatic and controlled components (Devine, 1989). Finally, we discuss loop-sided media reports and illusory correlation accounts as sources for negative attitudes against Muslims, beyond standard out-group derogation explanations.
A geographically-resolved, multi-level Bayesian model is used to analyze the data presented in the U.S. Police-Shooting Database (USPSD) in order to investigate the extent of racial bias in the shooting of American civilians by police officers in recent years. In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI's Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices. County-specific relative risk outcomes of being shot by police are estimated as a function of the interaction of: 1) whether suspects/civilians were armed or unarmed, and 2) the race/ethnicity of the suspects/civilians. The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average. Furthermore, the results of multi-level modeling show that there exists significant heterogeneity across counties in the extent of racial bias in police shootings, with some counties showing relative risk ratios of 20 to 1 or more. Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.
The longstanding issue of extrajudicial police shootings of racial and ethnic minority members has received unprecedented interest from the general public in the past year. To better understand this issue, researchers have examined racial shooter biases in the laboratory for more than a decade; however, shooter biases have been operationalized in multiple ways in previous studies with mixed results within and across measures. We meta-analyzed 42 studies, investigating five operationalizations of shooter biases (reaction time with/without a gun, false alarms, shooting sensitivity, and shooting threshold) and relevant moderators (e.g., racial prejudice, state level gun laws). Our results indicated that relative to White targets, participants were quicker to shoot armed Black targets (d av = −.13, 95% CI [−.19, −.06]), slower to not shoot unarmed Black targets (d av = .11, 95% CI [.05, .18), and more likely to have a liberal shooting threshold for Black targets (d av = −.19, 95% CI [−.37, −.01]). In addition, we found that in states with permissive (vs. restrictive) gun laws, the false alarm rate for shooting Black targets was higher and the shooting threshold for shooting Black targets was lower than for White targets. These results help provide critical insight into the psychology of race-based shooter decisions, which may have practical implications for intervention (e.g., training police officers) and prevention of the loss of life of racial and ethnic minorities.
Three studies tested basic assumptions derived from a theoretical model based on the dissociation of automatic and controlled processes involved in prejudice. Study 1 supported the model's assumption that high- and low-prejudice persons are equally knowledgeable of the cultural stereotype. The model suggests that the stereotype is automatically activated in the presence of a member (or some symbolic equivalent) of the stereotyped group and that low-prejudice responses require controlled inhibition of the automatically activated stereotype. Study 2, which examined the effects of automatic stereotype activation on the evaluation of ambiguous stereotype-relevant behaviors performed by a race-unspecified person, suggested that when subjects' ability to consciously monitor stereotype activation is precluded, both high- and low-prejudice subjects produce stereotype-congruent evaluations of ambiguous behaviors. Study 3 examined high- and low-prejudice subjects' responses in a consciously directed thought-listing task. Consistent with the model, only low-prejudice subjects inhibited the automatically activated stereotype-congruent thoughts and replaced them with thoughts reflecting equality and negations of the stereotype. The relation between stereotypes and prejudice and implications for prejudice reduction are discussed.
Three studies examined how participants use race to disambiguate visual stimuli. Participants performed a first-person-shooter task in which Black and White targets appeared holding either a gun or an innocuous object (e.g., a wallet). In Study 1, diffusion analysis (Ratcliff, 1978) showed that participants rapidly acquired information about a gun when it appeared in the hands of a Black target, and about an innocuous object in the hands of a White target. For counterstereotypic pairings (armed Whites, unarmed Blacks), participants acquired information more slowly. In Study 2, eye tracking showed that participants relied on more ambiguous information (measured by visual angle from fovea) when responding to stereotypic targets; for counterstereotypic targets, they achieved greater clarity before responding. In Study 3, participants were briefly exposed to targets (limiting access to visual information) but had unlimited time to respond. In spite of their slow, deliberative responses, they showed racial bias. This pattern is inconsistent with control failure and suggests that stereotypes influenced identification of the object. All 3 studies show that race affects visual processing by supplementing objective information.
Although performance on laboratory-based implicit bias tasks often is interpreted strictly in terms of the strength of automatic associations, recent evidence suggests that such tasks are influenced by higher-order cognitive control processes, so-called executive functions (EFs). However, extant work in this area has been limited by failure to account for the unity and diversity of EFs, focus on only a single measure of bias and/or EF, and relatively small sample sizes. The current study sought to comprehensively model the relation between individual differences in EFs and the expression of racial bias in 3 commonly used laboratory measures. Participants (N = 485) completed a battery of EF tasks (Session 1) and 3 racial bias tasks (Session 2), along with numerous individual difference questionnaires. The main findings were as follows: (a) measures of implicit bias were only weakly intercorrelated; (b) EF and estimates of automatic processes both predicted implicit bias and also interacted, such that the relation between automatic processes and bias expression was reduced at higher levels of EF; (c) specific facets of EF were differentially associated with overall task performance and controlled processing estimates across different bias tasks; (d) EF did not moderate associations between implicit and explicit measures of bias; and (e) external, but not internal, motivation to control prejudice depended on EF to reduce bias expression. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of global and specific EF abilities in determining expression of implicit racial bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Five university-based research groups competed to recruit forecasters, elicit their predictions, and aggregate those predictions to assign the most accurate probabilities to events in a 2-year geopolitical forecasting tournament. Our group tested and found support for three psychological drivers of accuracy: training, teaming, and tracking. Probability training corrected cognitive biases, encouraged forecasters to use reference classes, and provided forecasters with heuristics, such as averaging when multiple estimates were available. Teaming allowed forecasters to share information and discuss the rationales behind their beliefs. Tracking placed the highest performers (top 2% from Year 1) in elite teams that worked together. Results showed that probability training, team collaboration, and tracking improved both calibration and resolution. Forecasting is often viewed as a statistical problem, but forecasts can be improved with behavioral interventions. Training, teaming, and tracking are psychological interventions that dramatically increased the accuracy of forecasts. Statistical algorithms (reported elsewhere) improved the accuracy of the aggregation. Putting both statistics and psychology to work produced the best forecasts 2 years in a row.
This study investigated the effect of ego-depletion on the automatic and controlled components of stereotype-based responses. Participants engaged in a depleting task for either a short or a long period of time. They then performed a weapon identification task, which served as a measure of race stereotyping. Analyses guided by the L.L. Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure indicated that ego-depletion reduced the controlled component of responses, but did not affect the automatic component. Further, ego-depletion increased stereotypical responses only among those participants who showed strong automatic stereotype activation. The discussion focuses on methodologically and theoretically integrating notions of self-control and cognitive control.
Political or threat explanations for the state's use of internal violence suggest that killings committed by the police should be greatest in stratified jurisdictions with more minorities. Additional political effects such as race of the city's mayor or reform political arrangements are examined. The level of interpersonal violence the police encounter and other problems in departmental environments should account for these killing rates as well. Tobit analyses of 170 cities show that racial inequality explains police killings. Interpersonal violence measured by the murder rate also accounts for this use of lethal force. Separate analyses of police killings of blacks show that cities with more blacks and a recent growth in the black population have higher police killing rates of blacks, but the presence of a black mayor reduces these killings. Such findings support latent and direct political explanations for the internal use of lethal force to preserve order.
Traditional Muslim headscarves are called hijabs. The authors show that hijabs and headscarves are closely associated with people’s mental representation of “typical” Muslim women in Germany. They then investigate the influence of wearing such hijabs on acceptance rates in a human resources selection procedure. In this paradigm, the authors demonstrate a selection bias against women wearing hijabs: Although factual information about academic achievements had the largest effect on participants' decisions, decisions on all achievement levels were biased against women wearing hijabs. This pattern was substantiated by participants' response latencies; women wearing hijabs were more quickly rejected and more slowly accepted compared to women not wearing hijabs. The authors discuss these results' implications for public referendums (e.g., in Switzerland, 2009) and policy making (e.g., in France, 2004; in Germany, 2005) regarding Islamic culture.
The present study examined homicides by police officers, testing threat, community violence, and organizational hypotheses. Using UCR, SHR, Census, and LEMAS data the study extends previous research by examining the relative impact of community violence, inequality and race, and organizational characteristics on the number of killings of felons by police officers in large US cities. The findings show that measures of racial threat and community violence were related to police killings. Measures of organizational policies were largely unrelated to the number of police killings. Overall the study extends research in the area, yet it also points to a more general need for research on the effects of organizational factors on police violence.
In three studies, we examined how training may attenuate (or exacerbate) racial bias in the decision to shoot. In Experiment 1, when novices read a newspaper article about Black criminals, they showed pronounced racial bias in a first-person-shooter task (FPST); when they read about White criminals, bias was eliminated. Experts (who practiced the FPST) and police officers were unaffected by the same stereotype-accessibility manipulation. However, when training itself (base rates of armed vs. unarmed targets in the FPST, Experiment 2a; or special unit officers who routinely deal with minority gang members, Experiment 2b) reinforced the association between Blacks and danger, training did not attenuate bias. When race is unrelated to the presence/absence of a weapon, training may eliminate bias as participants learn to focus on diagnostic object information (gun vs. no gun). But when training actually promotes the utility of racial cues, it may sustain the heuristic use of stereotypes.
Objective
Advance the methodological techniques used to examine the influence of suspect race and ethnicity on participant decisions to shoot in an experimental setting.
Methods
After developing and testing a novel set of 60 realistic, high definition video deadly force scenarios based on 30 years of official data on officer-involved shootings in the United States, three separate experiments were conducted testing police (n = 36), civilian (n= 72) and military (n = 6) responses (n = 1,812) to the scenarios in high-fidelity computerized training simulators. Participants’ responses to White, Black and Hispanic suspects in potentially deadly situations were analyzed using a multi-level mixed methods strategy. Key response variables were reaction time to shoot and shooting errors.
Results
In all three experiments using a more externally valid research method than previous studies, we found that participants took longer to shoot Black suspects than White or Hispanic suspects. In addition, where errors were made, participants across experiments were more likely to shoot unarmed White suspects than unarmed Black or Hispanic suspects, and were more likely to fail to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White or Hispanic suspects. In sum, this research found that participants displayed significant bias favoring Black suspects in their decisions to shoot.
Conclusions
The results of these three experiments challenge the results of less robust experimental designs and shed additional light on the broad issue of the role that status characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, play in the criminal justice system. Future research should explore the generalizability of these findings, determine whether bias favoring Black suspects is a consequence of administrative measures (e.g., education, training, policies, and laws), and identify the cognitive processes that underlie this phenomenon.
Prior to each target letter string presented visually to 120 university students in a speeded word–nonword classification task, either {bird, body, building,} or {xxx} appeared as a priming event. Five types of word-prime/word-target trials were used: bird-robin, bird-arm, body-door, body-sparrow, and body-heart. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between prime and target letter string varied between 250 and 2,000 msec. At 2,000-msec SOA, reaction times (RTs) on bird-robin type trials were faster than on xxx-prime trials (facilitation), whereas RTs on bird-arm type trials were slower than on xxx-prime (inhibition). As SOA decreased, the facilitation effect on bird-robin trials remained constant, but the inhibition effect on bird-arm decreased until, at 250-msec SOA, there was no inhibition. For Shift conditions at 2,000-msec SOA, facilitation was obtained on body-door type trials and inhibition was obtained on body-sparrow type. These effects decreased as SOA decreased until there was no facilitation or inhibition. On body-heart type trials, there was an inhibition effect at 2,000 msec SOA, which decreased as SOA decreased until, at 250-msec SOA, it became a facilitation effect. Results support the theory of M. I. Posner and S. R. Snyder (1975) that postulated 2 distinct components of attention: a fast automatic inhibitionless spreading-activation process and a slow limited-capacity conscious-attention mechanism. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Recent research suggests 2 principal processes are assessed in many neuropsychological tests of prefrontal functioning: the ability to keep transient information on-line (working memory) and the ability to inhibit prepotent, but incorrect, responses. The current studies examined the hypothesis that taxing working memory beyond some threshold can result in decreased inhibition, resembling the errors committed by patients with prefrontal dysfunctions. Across 3 studies, 70 nonpatient subjects were tested on the antisaccade (AS) task (D. Guitton et al, 1985)—a task sensitive to inhibitory deficits. Subjects were required to look in the opposite direction of a flashed cue, inhibiting the reflexive tendency to saccade to the cue. Subjects performed concurrent tasks that varied working-memory load. The results indicated that conditions with the highest working-memory load produced inhibitory errors comparable to patients with prefrontal dysfunctions. The findings are discussed in terms of the interaction between working memory and the inhibition of prepotent responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In the 1st session of each of 2 studies, 48 undergraduates' accessible traits were elicited by asking them to list the characteristics of different people, with accessibility defined as frequency of output (Study 1) or primacy of output (Study 2). In the 2nd session, held 1 or 2 wks later, Ss read an essay describing the behaviors of a target person. The essay contained both accessible and inaccessible trait-related information for each S, with different traits being accessible or inaccessible for different Ss. Both studies found that Ss deleted significantly more inaccessible than accessible trait-related information in their impressions and reproductions of the target information. This effect on impressions and reproductions was evident 2 wks after exposure to the target information. Implications of this approach for personality differences, interpersonal conflict and attraction, similarity of self and other judgments, and therapeutic intervention are discussed. (55 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The traditional conception of validity divides it into three separate and substitutable types: content, criterion, and construct validities. This view is fragmented and incomplete, especially because it fails to take into account both evidence of the value implications of score meaning as a basis for action and the social consequences of score use. The new unified concept of validity interrelates these issues as fundamental aspects of a more comprehensive theory of construct validity that addresses both score meaning and social values in test interpretation and test use. That is, unified validity integrates considerations of content, criteria, and consequences into a construct framework for the empirical testing of rational hypotheses about score meaning and theoretically relevant relationships, including those of an applied and a scientific nature. Six distinguishable aspects of construct validity are highlighted as a means of addressing central issues implicit in the notion of validity as a unified concept. These are
content, substantive, structural, generalizability, external, and
consequential aspects of construct validity. In effect, these six aspects function as general validity criteria or standards for all educational and psychological measurement, including performance assessments, which are discussed in some detail because of their increasing emphasis in educational and employment settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Significance
Geographic variation in implicit bias is associated with multiple racial disparities in life outcomes. We investigated the historical roots of geographical differences in implicit bias by comparing average levels of implicit bias with the number of slaves in those areas in 1860. Counties and states more dependent on slavery in 1860 displayed higher pro-White implicit bias today among White residents and less pro-White bias among Black residents. Mediation analyses suggest that historical oppression may be transmitted into contemporary biases through structural inequalities, including disparities in poverty and upward mobility. Given the importance of contextual factors, efforts to reduce unintended discrimination might focus on modifying social environments that cue implicit biases in the minds of individuals.
Can implicit bias be changed? In a recent longitudinal study, Lai and colleagues (2016, Study 2) compared nine interventions intended to reduce racial bias across 18 university campuses. Although all interventions changed participants’ bias on an immediate test, none were effective after a delay. This study has been interpreted as strong evidence that implicit biases are difficult to change. We revisited Lai et al.’s study to test whether the stability observed reflected persistent individual attitudes or stable environments. Our reanalysis (N = 4,842) indicates that individual biases did not return to preexisting levels. Instead, campus means returned to preexisting campus means, whereas individual scores fluctuated mostly randomly. Campus means were predicted by markers of structural inequality. Our results are consistent with the theory that implicit bias reflects biases in the environment rather than individual dispositions. This conclusion is nearly the opposite of the original interpretation: Although social environments are stable, individual implicit biases are ephemeral.
Significance
Young Black men are stereotyped as threatening, which can have grave consequences for interactions with police. We show that these threat stereotypes are even greater for tall Black men, who face greater discrimination from police officers and elicit stronger judgments of threat. We challenge the assumption that height is intrinsically good for men. White men may benefit from height, but Black men may not. More broadly, we demonstrate how demographic factors (e.g., race) can influence how people interpret physical traits (e.g., height). This difference in interpretation is a matter not of magnitude but of meaning: The same trait is positive for some groups of people but negative for others.
As public awareness of implicit bias has grown in recent years, studies have raised important new questions about the nature of implicit bias effects. First, implicit biases are widespread and robust on average, yet are unstable across a few weeks. Second, young children display implicit biases indistinguishable from those of adults, which suggests to many that implicit biases are learned early. Yet, if implicit biases are unstable over weeks, how can they be stable for decades? Third, meta-analyses suggest that individual differences in implicit bias are associated weakly, although significantly, with individual differences in behavioral outcomes. Yet, studies of aggregate levels of implicit bias (i.e., countries, states, counties) are strongly associated with aggregate levels of disparities and discrimination. These puzzles are difficult to reconcile with traditional views, which treat implicit bias as an early-learned attitude that drives discrimination among individuals who are high in bias. We propose an alternative view of implicit bias, rooted in concept accessibility. Concept accessibility can, in principle, vary both chronically and situationally. The empirical evidence, however, suggests that most of the systematic variance in implicit bias is situational. Akin to the “wisdom of crowds” effect, implicit bias may emerge as the aggregate effect of individual fluctuations in concept accessibility that are ephemeral and context-dependent. This bias of crowds theory treats implicit bias tests as measures of situations more than persons. We show how the theory can resolve the puzzles posed and generate new insights into how and why implicit bias propagates inequalities.
We analyzed 990 police fatal shootings using data compiled by TheWashington Post
in 2015. After first providing a basic descriptive analysis of these shootings, we then
examined the data for evidence of implicit bias by using multivariate regression models
that predict two indicators of threat perception failure: (1) whether the civilian was not
attacking the officer(s) or other civilians just before being fatally shot and (2) whether
the civilian was unarmed when fatally shot. The results indicated civilians from “other”
minority groups were significantly more likely than Whites to have not been attacking
the officer(s) or other civilians and that Black civilians were more than twice as likely
as White civilians to have been unarmed.
In two experiments, primed subjects were exposed to violent and misogynistic rap music and control subjects were exposed to popular music. Experiment 1 showed that violent and misogynistic rap music increased the automatic associations underlying evaluative racial stereotypes in high and low prejudiced subjects alike. By contrast, explicit stereotyping was dependent on priming and subjects’ prejudice level. In Experiment 2, the priming manipulation was followed by a seemingly unrelated person perception task in which subjects rated Black or White targets described as behaving ambiguously. As expected, primed subjects judged a Black target less favorably than a White target. By contrast, control subjects rated Black and White targets similarly. Subjects’ level of prejudice did not moderate these findings, suggesting the robustness of priming effects on social judgments.
North Carolina mandated the first collection of demographic data on all traffic stops during a surge of attention to the phenomenon of “driving while black” in the late 1990s. Based on analysis of over 18 million traffic stops, we show dramatic disparities in the rates at which black drivers, particularly young males, are searched and arrested as compared to similarly situated whites, women, or older drivers. Further, the degree of racial disparity is growing over time. Finally, the rate at which searches lead to the discovery of contraband is consistently lower for blacks than for whites, providing strong evidence that the empirical disparities we uncover are in fact evidence of racial bias. The findings are robust to a variety of statistical specifications and consistent with findings in other jurisdictions.
Pervasive stereotypes linking Black men with violence and criminality can lead to implicit cognitive biases, including the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons. In four experiments, we investigated whether these biases extend even to young Black boys (5-year-olds). White participants completed sequential priming tasks in which they categorized threatening and nonthreatening objects and words after brief presentations of faces of various races (Black and White) and ages (children and adults). Results consistently revealed that participants had less difficulty (i.e., faster response times, fewer errors) identifying threatening stimuli and more difficulty identifying nonthreatening stimuli after seeing Black faces than after seeing White faces, and this racial bias was equally strong following adult and child faces. Process-dissociation-procedure analyses further revealed that these effects were driven entirely by automatic (i.e., unintentional) racial biases. The collective findings suggest that the perceived threat commonly associated with Black men may generalize even to young Black boys.
Research Summary
Race-related debates often assume that implicit racial bias will result in racially biased decisions to shoot. Previous research has examined racial bias in police decisions by pressing “shoot” or “don't-shoot” buttons in response to pictures of armed and unarmed suspects. As a result of its lack of external validity, however, this methodology provides limited insight into officer behavior in the field. In response, we conducted the first series of experimental research studies that tested police officers and civilians in strikingly realistic deadly force simulators.
Policy Implications
This article reports the results of our most recent experiment, which tested 80 police patrol officers by applying this leading edge method. We found that, despite clear evidence of implicit bias against Black suspects, officers were slower to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White suspects, and they were less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects. These findings challenge the assumption that implicit racial bias affects police behavior in deadly encounters with Black suspects.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12187/abstract
The current study examined blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal underlying racial differences in threat detection. During fMRI, participants determined whether pictures of Black or White individuals held weapons. They were instructed to make shoot responses when the picture showed armed individuals but don't shoot responses to unarmed individuals, with the cost of not shooting armed individuals being greater than that of shooting unarmed individuals. Participants were faster to shoot armed Blacks than Whites, but faster in making don't shoot responses to unarmed Whites than Blacks. Brain activity differed to armed versus unarmed targets depending on target race, suggesting different mechanisms underlying threat versus safety decisions. Anterior cingulate cortex was preferentially engaged for unarmed Whites than Blacks.. Parietal and visual cortical regions exhibited greater activity for armed Blacks than Whites.. Seed-based functional connectivity of the amygdala revealed greater coherence with parietal and visual cortices for armed Blacks than Whites. Furthermore, greater implicit Black-danger associations were associated with increased amygdala activation to armed Blacks, compared to armed Whites. Our results suggest that different neural mechanisms may underlie racial differences in responses to armed versus unarmed targets.
With the assumption that a stereotype is in part, a collection of associations that link a target group to a set of descriptive characteristics, the present research engaged high-and low-prejudice scoring white subjects (19 males, Experiment 1; 9 males and 12 females, Experiment 2) in a lexical decision task patterned after Meyer and Schvaneveldt (1971, 1976). The task yields a measure of associative strength between two words (e.g., BLACK:LAZY; WHITES:LAZY) based upon the amount of time subjects take to decide whether or not they are both words. Meyer and Schvaneveldt reported that high associates (NURSE:DOCTOR) yielded faster reaction times than low associates (DOCTOR:BUTTER). The results of the present research indicated that subjects, regardless of prejudice score, responded reliably faster when positive attitudes (e.g., SMART) were paired with WHITES than when they were paired with BLACKS (Experiment 1) or with NEGROES (Experiment 2). Nevertheless, negative attributes paired with BLACKS or NEGROES were responded to as quickly as when they were paired with WHITES. These results, together with Experiment 3, which involved the ascription of these characteristics more directly, suggest that white college students, no longer differentially associate or ascribe negative characteristics, but continue to differentially associate and ascribe positive attributes to black and to whites.
We examined implicit race biases in the decision to shoot potentially hostile targets in a multiethnic context. Results of two studies showed that college‐aged participants and police officers showed anti‐Black racial bias in their response times: they were quicker to correctly shoot armed Black targets and to indicate “don't shoot” for unarmed Latino, Asian, and White targets. In addition, police officers showed racial biases in response times toward Latinos versus Asians or Whites, and surprisingly, toward Whites versus Asians. Results also showed that the accuracy of decisions to shoot was higher for Black and Latino targets than for White and Asian targets. Finally, the degree of bias shown by police officers toward Blacks was related to contact, attitudes, and stereotypes. Overestimation of community violent crime correlated with greater bias toward Latinos but less toward Whites. Implications for police training to ameliorate biases are discussed.
This chapter describes the role of naïve theories of bias in bias correction in the flexible correction model. The notion of bias correction was reviewed across a variety of research domains. Corrections are often the result of people consulting their naive theories of the influence of potentially biasing factors on their perception of the target. This view differs from competing views of bias correction because a view of corrections based on perceivers' naive theories of bias allows for a more flexible set of corrections than those proposed by other current models of bias removal. The chapter illustrates that flexible correction model (FCM) principles demonstrate the relevance of the perspective to a variety of research areas (including persuasion, attribution, impression formation, stereotyping, and mood). Finally, this chapter hopes that research and theory based on flexible correction notions will help to build a unifying framework within which correction processes in many areas of psychology can be investigated and explained.
The present article reviews evidence for the malleability of automatic stereotypes and prejudice. In contrast to assumptions that such responses are fixed and ines- capable, it is shown that automatic stereotypes and prejudice are influenced by, (a) self- and social motives, (b) specific strategies, (c) the perceiver's focus of atten- tion, and (d) the configuration of stimulus cues. In addition, group members' indi- vidual characteristics are shown to influence the extent to which (global) stereo- types and prejudice are automatically activated. This evidence has significant implications for conceptions of automaticity, models of stereotyping and prejudice, and attitude representation. The review concludes with the description of an initial model of early social information processing. Given a thimbleful of facts we rush to make general- izations as large as a tub. … Life is short, and the de- mands upon us for practical adjustments so great, that we cannot let our ignorance detain us in our daily transactions. (Allport, 1954, p. 9)
This paper tests two perspectives on the use of deadly force by police officers: the “community violence” and the “conflict” hypotheses. From descriptive data on felons killed in the Supplemental Homicide Reports it appears that police-caused homicides are predictable responses to acts or threatened acts of violence. An examination of the largest U.S. cities revealed a strong relationship between levels of economic inequality and the rate of felon killing by police officers as well as a weaker, yet consistent relationship between percent black and felon killing, supporting the conflict hypothesis. A relationship exists between violent crime rates and felon killing, but violent crime most often plays an intervening role between other social factors and the rate of felon killing. Our findings suggest that economic inequality should be included in any macro-level explanation of police-caused homicide.
This paper examines the role of attentional capacity in stereotyping processes. We begin with an overview of different theoretical perspectives on this issue. Then we document how recent research has extended our understanding of the relationship between attention and stereotyping. First, we consider how variations in attentional resources influence social categorization, stereotype activation, stereotype application, and stereotype inhibition. Evidence from each of these domains supports the conclusion that stereotype-based impression formation is less resource-consuming than individuation. Second, we examine the role of attentional capacity in the encoding, retrieval, and meta-cognitive processing of stereotypical and counter-stereotypical information. Recent research extends our understanding of exactly how and why stereotype use is relatively efficient.
Finally, we discuss the need to better specify the conditions under which attention is and is not likely to be impaired. New evidence suggests that such considerations have important implications for understanding stereotyping. We conclude that there is now an abundant variety of evidence underscoring the importance of attentional resources in stereotyping.
Such a general characteristic of human functioning as limited attentional capacity should have an important role to play in thought and action (Mandler, 1985, p. 66).
… human attempts to understand the physical or biological environment… work(s) within the limits imposed by the capacities of individual human minds … A “satisfactory” explanation will manage to preserve personal integrity while at the same time-for reasons of cognitive economy-it will tend towards as much simplification as the situation allows for (Tajfel, 1969, pp. 79,92).
Does Islamic appearance increase aggressive tendencies, and what role does affect play in such responses? In a computer game, participants made rapid decisions to shoot at armed people, some of whom wore Islamic head dress. We predicted and found a significant bias for participants to shoot more at Muslim targets. We also predicted and found that positive mood selectively increased aggressive tendencies towards Muslims, consistent with affect-cognition theories that predict a more top-down, stereotypical processing style in positive mood. In contrast, induced anger increased the propensity to shoot at all targets. The relevance of these results for our understanding of real-life negative reactions towards Muslims is discussed, and the influence of affective states on rapid aggressive responses is considered.