Reports
Target prototypicality moderates racial bias in the decision to shoot

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.11.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Research shows that target race can influence the decision to shoot armed and unarmed Black and White males (e.g., Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002). To date, however, research has only examined category level effects by comparing average responses to Blacks and Whites. The current studies investigated whether target prototypicality influences the decision to shoot above and beyond the effect of race. Here, we replicated racial bias in shoot decisions and demonstrated that bias was moderated by target prototypicality. As target prototypicality increased, participants showed greater racial bias. Further, when targets were unprototypic, racial bias reversed (e.g., participants mistakenly shot more unarmed Whites than Blacks). Study 2 examined whether these effects were observed among police officers. Although police showed no racial bias on average, target prototypicality significantly influenced judgments. Across both studies, sensitivity to variability in Whites' prototypicality drove these effects, while variation in Black prototypicality did not affect participants' decisions.

Introduction

The past decade witnessed an explosion of research dedicated to understanding police officers' shoot decisions (e.g., Correll et al., 2002, Greenwald et al., 2003, Payne, 2001, Plant et al., 2005). Correll et al. (2002), for example, present participants with a computer-based first-person shooter task (FPST) in which participants adopt the perspective of a patrolling police officer. Participants view scenes of public areas and periodically, a male target appears. Targets are Black or White and are armed (i.e., carrying a gun) or unarmed (i.e., carrying a benign object like a cellular phone or wallet). Participants are asked to press one button to indicate “shoot” when the target is armed or another to indicate “don't shoot” when the target is unarmed. Typically, participants are faster to shoot armed targets who are Black compared to White, but are faster to indicate “don't shoot” when unarmed targets are White rather than Black. Participants also mistakenly shoot unarmed Blacks more frequently than unarmed Whites, and fail to shoot armed Whites more frequently than armed Blacks. Although research on the decision to shoot has yielded critical insights, investigations to date have examined mean-level comparisons of responses to Black targets to White targets. This analytic approach reflects the predominant view that categorization processes are the basis for stereotyping and prejudice (e.g., Allport, 1954, Fiske and Taylor, 1991). Recently, however, some researchers have shifted away from the notion that category membership alone produces stereotypic inference by demonstrating that these processes are sensitive to, and further influenced by, within-category variation. The idea of graded categories is not new (e.g., Brewer, 1988, Rosch, 1978, Rothbart and John, 1985), although the idea has experienced a resurgence recently (e.g., Blair, Judd and Chapleau, 2004, Blair, Judd and Fallman, 2004, Blair et al., 2002, Eberhardt et al., 2006, Livingston and Brewer, 2002, Maddox and Gray, 2002). This research finds that stereotyping and prejudice vary as a function of a target's goodness of fit within the category. This goodness of fit, which we refer to as prototypicality, represents how similar a target's physical features are to those traditionally associated with the category.

The current studies provide an empirical demonstration that within-category differences moderate the decision to shoot above and beyond the effects attributable to racial category. We begin by reviewing past research that has examined prototypicality effects on prejudice and stereotyping.

Section snippets

Prototypicality effects on implicit prejudice

Livingston and Brewer (2002) investigated the extent to which racial category and Afrocentricity (akin to prototypicality) impacted implicit prejudice. They showed that highly prototypic Black targets (e.g., broad nose, large lips, coarse hair texture, dark skin tone) elicited more prejudice than less prototypic targets (see also Uhlmann, Dasgupta, Elgueta, Greenwald, & Swanson, 2002). Research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has also demonstrated that exposure to

Prototypicality effects on explicit stereotyping

The above research shows that prejudice can be feature-based, but does not demonstrate prototypicality-based stereotyping. In fact, Livingston and Brewer (2002) found that prototypicality affected prejudice, but not stereotype activation. Others, however, have shown that prototypicality does influence explicit judgments about a target's attributes. Early research by Anderson and Cromwell (1977) showed that fairer-complected individuals were associated with higher intelligence than those with

The present studies

The current research contributes to a growing body of work that focuses on the importance of category variability by testing whether prototypicality affects the decision to shoot. Replicating past research, we expected to find evidence for category-based bias in shoot decisions, but we further hypothesized that the magnitude of this bias would depend on prototypicality. We predicted that racial bias would be greater among targets that are rated as more prototypic of their racial category (i.e.,

References (30)

  • A.G. Greenwald et al.

    Targets of discrimination: Effects of race on response to weapon holders

    Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

    (2003)
  • E.A. Plant et al.

    Eliminating automatic racial bias: Making race non-diagnostic for responses to criminal suspects

    Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

    (2005)
  • G.W. Allport

    The nature of prejudice

    (1954)
  • C. Anderson et al.

    “Black is beautiful” and the color preferences of Afro- American Youth

    The Journal of Negro Education

    (1977)
  • I.V. Blair et al.

    Afrocentric facial features and stereotyping

  • I.V. Blair et al.

    The influence of Afrocentric facial features in criminal sentencing

    Psychological Science

    (2004)
  • I.V. Blair et al.

    The automaticity of race and Afrocentric facial features in social judgments

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2004)
  • I.V. Blair et al.

    The role of Afrocentric features in person perception: Judging by features and categories

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2002)
  • M.B. Brewer

    A dual-process model of impression formation

  • J. Correll et al.

    The police officer's dilemma: Using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2002)
  • J. Correll et al.

    The influence of stereotypes on decisions to shoot

    European Journal of Social Psychology

    (2007)
  • J. Correll et al.

    Across the thin blue line: Police officers and racial bias in the decision to shoot

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2007)
  • J.L. Eberhardt et al.

    Looking deathworthy: Perceived prototypicality of Black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes

    Psychological Science

    (2006)
  • FiskeS.T. et al.

    Social cognition

    (1991)
  • P.W. Linville et al.

    Perceived distributions of the characteristics of in-group and out-group members: Empirical evidence and a computer simulation

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1989)
  • Cited by (60)

    • How unintentional cues can bias threat assessments during shoot/don't-shoot simulations

      2021, Applied Ergonomics
      Citation Excerpt :

      In general, a lethal force decision is derived from a threat assessment, which is defined here as holistic processing of the scenario to include a wide array of factors such as weapon presence, determining hostile intent, and emotion—to list only a few of the many factors involved. The most well-documented potential bias in these decisions has been racial or stereotype-based biases that alter decision making when identifying weapon presence (Correll et al., 2002; Correll et al., 2006; Ma and Correll, 2011; Sim et al., 2013; but see also James, 2018; James et al., 2016; 2018). Notably, the decision is not a static one as evidence accumulates prior to the final decision to fire a shot (Pleskac et al., 2018).

    • Race, weapons, and the perception of threat

      2020, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology
    • The effects of category and physical features on stereotyping and evaluation

      2018, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Features impact important, real-world judgments across multiple facets of life. As we describe at the outset of the paper, researchers have established that the one's facial physiognomy can affect how individuals are treated with respect to hugely consequential legal decisions (Blair, Judd, & Chapleau, 2004; Eberhardt et al., 2006; Ma & Correll, 2011). Others have illustrated that individual differences in stereotypical face features correlate with earnings, organizational prestige, and professional rank (Livingston & Pearce, 2009).

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Primary support for this work was provided by National Science Foundation Continuing grant 0642580 to the second author. We would like to thank Bernd Wittenbrink and Bernadette Park for their insightful comments on this research. We also thank members of the University of Chicago Stereotyping and Prejudice Research Laboratory and Mulligan Ma for their comments on earlier drafts of this work.

    View full text