Bernd Wittenbrink

Across the Thin Blue Line: Police Officers and Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot

Police officers were compared with community members in terms of the speed and accuracy with which they made simulated decisions to shoot (or not shoot) Black and White targets. Both samples exhibited robust racial bias in response speed. Officers outperformed community members on a number of measures, including overall speed and accuracy. Moreover, although community respondents set the decision criterion lower for Black targets than for White targets (indicating bias), police officers did not. The authors suggest that training may not affect the speed with which stereotype-incongruent targets are processed but that it does affect the ultimate decision (particularly the placement of the decision criterion). Findings from a study in which a college sample received training support this conclusion.

Structural properties of stereotypic knowledge and their influences on the construal of social situations

This research focused on the role that higher order structural properties of stereotypic knowledge play in the processing of social information. It is argued that stereotypic assumptions about cause-effect relations provide important constraints for the causal structure underlying the perceivers subjective representation of social information. Experiment 1 shows how, within the context of a jury decision experiment, the causal structure underlying stereotypic knowledge about African Americans influences the construal of causality in a situation involving a member of that group. Results from 2 additional experiments indicate that this construal effect is based in part on stereotypic knowledge affecting the encoding of the trial evidence instead of on biasing responses at the output stage. The implications of these findings are discussed, and a theoretical framework is offered according to which the application of category knowledge involves not only the matching of stereotypic attributes but also the alignment of structural relations in the environment.

Stereotypic Vision: How Stereotypes Disambiguate Visual Stimuli

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.