ReportsTarget prototypicality moderates racial bias in the decision to shoot☆
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.,
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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.