Emily Balcetis’s research while affiliated with The Graduate Center, CUNY and other places

Individuals from different social groups form divergent legal punishment decisions about police officers engaged in altercations with civilians despite viewing the same visual evidence. We review empirical and archival data in the legal domain to offer four vision‐based moderators of polarized legal judgments determined after viewing evidence with a focus on research relevant to police‐civilian altercations. We discuss how selective visual attention, flittering and staring tendencies, differences in cognitive engagement, and visual confirmation bias contribute to divergent legal decisions within and across social groups. By incorporating visual experience into models of legal decision‐making, we reconcile inconsistencies regarding the impact of social group identity on bias in police punishment.

One of the most pressing tasks facing policymakers in the 21st century is reducing stark group‐based inequalities that have developed within many societies because of centuries of structural discrimination. However, efforts to redress group disparities through equality‐promoting policies are frequently met with policy backlash and countermobilization. We describe several social psychological contributors to policy backlash, distinguishing between identity‐based and ideology‐based processes. While the role of identity politics in driving support and opposition to policies pertaining to race, gender, and sexual orientation is well‐known, less attention has been given to the role of ideological motivation, including individual and group differences in system justification tendencies to defend and bolster the societal status quo. In this article, we develop a framework based on system justification theory to understand why backlash against equality‐promoting policies occurs, when such backlash is most likely to occur, and who is most likely to be countermobilized against such policies. From this perspective, policy backlash is motivated not only by the desire on the part of advantaged group members to maintain their own existing privileges but also by the broader desire to maintain the perceived legitimacy and stability of the overarching social system. We make recommendations about how leaders can develop and communicate about equality‐promoting policies in a way that reduces the likelihood of backlash due to system justification motivation.

Despite ground-breaking technological advances, scientists still have difficulty patching one of the most threatening bugs in the cyber world: human error. Individuals constitute a unique vulnerability in cybersecurity because they systematically make errors when perceiving their own risk. Specifically, individuals underestimate their own susceptibility to cyber-attacks. Among the most common ways companies seek to improve security is presenting clients and employees with base rate information on the prevalence of cyber threats and the likelihood of the general population to succumb to them. This strategy is intended to increase the accuracy with which clients and employees assess their threat levels. However, outcomes typically fall short of this goal. We review the differential use of base rate information as a cognitive and motivational bias that contributes to forecasting errors and accuracy in self and social risk assessment. We also examine two dimensions of sociocultural orientation: individualism-collectivism and tightness-looseness-and their potential influence on the use of base rate information. We discuss implications for interventions that could mitigate the threat of cyber-attacks

Although psychology has long professed that perception predicts action, the strength of the evidence supporting the statement depends on the ecological validity of the technologies and paradigms used, particularly those that track eye movements, supporting Cesario's argument. While right to call for ecological validity, Cesario's model fails to account for individual differences in visual experience perceivers have when presented with the same stimulus.

Is seeing knowing? The authors challenge the widely held assumption that perception is a veridical representation of reality and explore the implications of such perceived veridicality of the experience of visual evidence for legal judgments. Judges, policymakers, and the public value visual and in particular video evidence because most believe that what they see when watching video precludes all interpretations of case facts but the correct and truthful one. This naïve realism, however, is undermined by the limitations of both video as well as perceivers. Non-conscious biases in the way that people selectively attend to video evidence can determine whether one person “sees” evidence of guilt or instead “sees” evidence of innocence. The authors review factors that direct visual attention, such as group identity, threat, and expectation. They suggest that selective solicitation of visual information, as well as the failure to question one’s visual experience, challenge the ability for perceivers to establish truth, which may undermine the legitimacy of the legal system. They discuss implications for the trust people hold in their visual experiences.

Video evidence depicting physical altercations has polarized public opinions and courtroom decisions about social issues including race relations and police use-of-force, we believe, in part because of the way people process dynamic visual stimuli across repeated viewing opportunities. We reanalyzed two studies that covertly collected eye-tracking data to quantify and model visual confirmation bias (VCB) – the degree to which eye movements replicate previous patterns of looking across multiple viewing opportunities. We tracked the location of eye gaze when participants (N1 = 320; N2 = 212) watched the same video twice depicting an altercation between an officer and a civilian (Study 1) or a Black and a White actor (Study 2). In pilot tests, we provided evidence regarding the construct validity of statistical measures of concordance tracking similarities in where perceivers directed eye gaze across viewings as an index of VCB. In our pre-registered analytic plan, we used these metrics to probe for relationships with punishment decisions made about targets after the first and second viewings. Contrary to predictions, our pre-registered analyses found no associations between VCB, consistency, and polarization in punishment. We present exploratory analyses probing potential moderators of the association between VCB and these outcome measures. We offer practical suggestions for researchers measuring and modeling eye gaze during the presentation of dynamic stimuli across multiple viewings, particularly in the context of intergroup decision research.

Attacks exploiting the innate and the acquired vulnerabilities of human users have posed severe threats to cybersecurity. This work proposes ADVERT, a human-technical solution that generates adaptive visual aids in real-time to prevent users from inadvertence and reduce their susceptibility to phishing attacks. Based on the eye-tracking data, we extract visual states and attention states as system-level sufficient statistics to characterize the user’s visual behaviors and attention status. By adopting a data-driven approach and two learning feedback of different time scales, this work lays out a theoretical foundation to analyze , evaluate , and particularly modify humans’ attention processes while they vet and recognize phishing emails. We corroborate the effectiveness , efficiency , and robustness of ADVERT through a case study based on the data set collected from human subject experiments conducted at New York University. The results show that the visual aids can statistically increase the attention level and improve the accuracy of phishing recognition from 74.6% to a minimum of 86%. The meta-adaptation can further improve the accuracy to 91.5% (resp. 93.7%) in less than 3 (resp. 50) tuning stages.