Targets of discrimination: Effects of race on responses to weapons holders

Rapid actions to persons holding weapons were simulated using desktop virtual reality. Subjects responded to simulated (a) criminals, by pointing the computer s mouse at them and left-clicking (simulated shooting), (b) fellow police officers, by pressing the spacebar (safety signal), and (c) citizens, by inaction. In one of two tasks Black males holding guns were police officers while White males holding guns were criminals. In the other, Whites with guns were police and Blacks with guns were criminals. In both tasks Blacks or Whites holding harmless objects were citizens. Signal detection analyses revealed two race effects that led to Blacks being incorrectly shot at more than Whites: a perceptual sensitivity effect (when held by Blacks guns were less distinguishable from harmless objects) and a response bias effect (objects held by Blacks were more likely to be treated as guns). 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved. Reporting a non-existent fire is a false alarm. More generally, false alarms are errors of acting as if an important event has occurred when it has not. This paper is concerned with a specific type of false alarm—acting as if a weapon is present when it is not. There have been many such false alarms by police officers who believed themselves to be in the presence of a threatening, armed antagonist when they were confronted only by an unarmed citizen. The error in these cases can be the tragic error of mistakenly shooting at, perhaps killing or seriously injuring, a non-threatening citizen. A disturbingly frequent component of these erroneous shootings has been that the unarmed citizen/victim was Black (Fyfe, 1982). In trying to understand why these false alarms occur, it is natural to think of the social psychological concept of stereotype, defined as the association of a group (such as elderly, Asian, or female) with a trait (such as conservatism, diligence, or nurturance). In the case of erroneously acting as if Blacks are armed, the relevant stereotype is an association that links the group, Blacks, to the trait of dangerousness or criminality. * Corresponding author. Fax: 1-206-685-3157. E-mail address: [email protected] (A.G. Greenwald). 1 See also www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/metro/md/princegeorges/government/police/shootings/; www.prospect.org/webfeatures/ 2001/05/sobel-l-05-08.html. 0022-1031/03/$ see front matter 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights doi:10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00020-9 The concept of stereotype captures the existence of group-trait associations, but stops short of explaining how these associations can lead to erroneous actions such as accidental shootings. Banaji and Greenwald (1995) proposed to fill this explanatory gap with a well-established psychophysical method for analyzing perceptual decisions, signal detection theory (SDT; Green & Swets, 1967). SDT permits analysis of repeated encounters of a critical situation to determine the extent to which false alarms are due to (a) failures of perceptual sensitivity— limited ability to distinguish the critical event s presence from its absence, or (b) response bias—increased reporting of the critical event whether or not it has occurred. To illustrate: Suppose that a radiologist s record shows a history in which lung biopsies, recommended after examining X-rays, have revealed lung cancer less often for men than for women patients. Signal detection analysis can determine whether the radiologist s greater false alarms (orders of biopsies that reveal no disease) for men are due to greater difficulty in distinguishing healthy from malignant tissue on men s X-ray images (a perceptual sensitivity cause) or, alternately, to a generally greater tendency to advise biopsies for men (a response bias cause). 2 In order actually to apply SDT to the radiologist example it would be necessary also to know the malignant versus non-malignant status for patients for whom biopsies were not ordered.