Police called to the scene of a crime often face a difficult
situation. There may be one or more
potential perpetrators. There is yelling
and screaming. People are running
around. One or more people may be armed. In this situation, the police are asked to
make split-second decisions about how to proceed. Failing to shoot an armed suspect could lead
a police officer to get shot. Shooting
an unarmed or potentially innocent person can lead to tragedy.
Despite all of their training, mistakes do happen. And when they happen, they often end up as
front-page news. The news coverage gets
particularly heated when White police officers shoot an unarmed African
American suspect or an innocent bystander.
Research suggests that there is a bias for White people to
shoot unarmed Black suspects more often than unarmed White suspects. These findings in laboratory studies have
been obtained both with trained police officers as well as with college
students role-playing as police officers.
This is called the shooter bias.
An interesting set of studies by Saul Miller, Kate
Zielaskowski and Ashby Plant in the October, 2012 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin explored why this
happens.
One possibility is that there is a pervasive stereotype in
the United States that Black men are more dangerous than White men. One possibility is that this stereotype
causes people to be more likely to make the snap decision to shoot a Black man
than to shoot a White man. A second
possibility is that people are prone to shoot anyone who belongs to a different
social group than they do, and that specific stereotypes about Whites and
Blacks are not the primary cause of the shooter bias.
To explore this issue, college students participated in a
simulated shooting task in which they saw faces of men. The faces were either paired with a gun or
with a neutral object. They had to press
a button within 630 milliseconds of the appearance of the face to decide
whether to shoot. The task was to shoot
when there was a gun and not to shoot when there was no gun.
In these studies, all participants filled out a
questionnaire assessing their belief about whether the world is a dangerous
place. This questionnaire has items like
“There are many dangerous people in our society who will attack someone out of
pure meanness, for no reason at all.”
The more that someone believes that the world is a dangerous place, the
more likely they may be to have a shooter bias.
In the first study, all of the faces were White males. Participants were given a personality quiz at
the start of the experiment and on the basis of that quiz were told that they
had either a “Red” or a “Green” personality.
In actuality, the color was randomly assigned to them. They were given a sticker of their color to
wear. The faces they saw during the
study appeared either on a red or a green background, and participants were
told that this color reflected the personality of the individual shown.
In this study, participants who were moderate or low in
their belief that the world is dangerous showed no shooter bias. But, people who were high in their belief
that the world is dangerous were more likely to shoot an unarmed person if that
individual’s personality color was different from their own than if it was the
same.
This result suggests that the shooter bias can happen, even
in the absence of a cultural stereotype that a person is dangerous.
In a second study, White college students saw White, Black,
and Asian faces. For this group of
students, the cultural stereotype that Black men are dangerous was strong, but
there was no cultural stereotype that Asian males are dangerous. In this study, there was a broad tendency for
all participants (regardless of their belief that the world is dangerous) to
mistakenly shoot unarmed Black men more often than to shoot either Asian or
White men. For participants whose belief
that the world is dangerous, though, they were also more likely to mistakenly
shoot Asian men than to shoot White men.
What does all of this mean?
There seem to be two sources of shooter bias. First, there are cultural stereotypes (like
the stereotype that Black men are dangerous) that influence people’s snap
judgments. On top of that, for people
who are already concerned that the world is dangerous, there is a bias against
anyone who is in a different group.
This work suggests that the belief that the world is
dangerous is an important factor. People
with a low level of belief that the world is dangerous are much less likely to
mistakenly shoot an unarmed person.
One reason that this finding is important is that many
advocates of concealed weapon laws justify the importance of these laws on the
premise that the world is a dangerous place.
The idea is that if more people were carrying weapons, then that would
make the world safer. Unfortunately,
promoting the belief that the world is dangerous may also promote a mindset that
increases the likelihood that innocent people will get shot. More research should explore this issue. In addition, future studies should explore
whether teaching people that the world is not as dangerous as they think it is
can reduce the shooter bias.
