Hierarchy of bias seen in decision to shoot

Good science asks questions, and when, as often as not, the answers point to further questions, the cycle begins again.

That applies no less to controversial or surprising results. And in a United States still haunted by the legacies of race and slavery, even asking questions pertaining to race is disquieting to some. Even so, University of Colorado Boulder researchers have been exploring racial bias in police shootings for more than a decade.

Now, in the first study of its kind, Joshua Correll, Bernadette Park and Charles M. Judd of CU’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Melody Sadler of San Diego State University have examined how police and a group of undergraduate subjects decide whether to shoot or not to shoot “suspects” in a multi-ethnic environment.

“Most studies on the subject of stereotyping and prejudice look at two (ethnic) groups, usually in isolation. It’s always one group against another group,” says Correll, a CU grad who joined the faculty in August after a stint at the University of Chicago.

“But as the country becomes more ethnically diverse, it’s more and more important to start thinking about how we process racial and ethnic cues in a multicultural environment.”

Some of the findings in “The World Is Not Black and White: Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot in a Multiethnic Context” (published recently in the Journal of Social Issues) are perhaps not surprising. But they do raise uncomfortable questions for further study.

As with most previous studies into the question, data were gathered from subjects playing a “first person shooter” video game, in which figures of varying ethnicity — Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic and African American — pop up, either “armed” with a weapon or another benign object, such as a cell phone.

Participants — 69 CU-Boulder undergraduates and 254 police officers — had to make quick decisions as to which figures pose a “threat” and shoot them.

“The primary conclusion was that in both samples, the undergraduates and the police officers, there was a fairly robust pattern of anti-black bias,” Correll says. “They were faster to shoot a black target and slower to decide not to shoot an unarmed black target.”

That information, unsettling as it may be, is not new. What is new is what Correll calls a “hierarchy of bias,” in which both students and police were mostly likely to shoot at black, then Hispanics, then whites and finally, in a case of what might be called a positive bias, Asians.

“That’s generally what we would have predicted. It kind of conforms to our cultural stereotypes,” he says.

The research demonstrates how persistent cultural stereotypes are, Correll says. Even students who displayed little bias when interviewed demonstrated otherwise when faced with a split-second decision.

“I may not believe it personally, but I am exposed to stereotypes constantly through media or social networks … (such as) the idea that young black men are dangerous,” he says. “Those associations can have an influence on my behavior even if I don’t believe them.”

The study found that police were considerably more accurate than students at correctly identifying a genuinely threatening suspect, as opposed to those brandishing a cell phone or wallet, perhaps a reflection of training. But officers were still influenced by the target’s race — an influence that may derive from the officers’ “contacts, attitudes, and stereotypes.”

For example, police who endorsed more violent stereotypes about Hispanics and those who overestimated the prevalence of violent crime in their districts demonstrated more bias to shoot Hispanic targets. That raises the question of whether police are responding to real-world threats — and whether that means some ethnic groups really are more likely to be armed and dangerous than others.

“That is a very sensitive question, whether or not (police officers’) reactions are based on some kind of truth. Is this police officers responding to reality on the ground? The short answer is, we don’t know,” Correll says. “But this research almost demands that we ask that question.”