The Police Officer's Dilemma: A Decade of Research on Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot : The Police Officer's Dilemma

The content of spontaneously activated racial stereotypes among White Americans and the relation of this to more explicit measures of stereotyping and prejudice were investigated. Using a semantic priming paradigm, a prime was presented outside of conscious awareness (BLACK or WHITE), followed by a target stimulus requiring a word-nonword decision. The target stimuli included attributes that varied in valence and stereotypicality for Whites and African Americans. Results showed reliable stereotyping and prejudice effects: Black primes resulted in substantially stronger facilitation to negative than positive stereotypic attributes, whereas White primes facilitated positive more than negative stereotypic traits. The magnitude of this implicit prejudice effect correlated reliably with participants' scores on explicit racial attitude measures, indicating that people's spontaneous stereotypic associations are consistent with their more controlled responses.

Two experiments used a priming paradigm to investigate the influence of racial cues on the perceptual identification of weapons. In Experiment 1, participants identified guns faster when primed with Black faces compared with White faces. In Experiment 2, participants were required to respond quickly, causing the racial bias to shift from reaction time to accuracy. Participants misidentified tools as guns more often when primed with a Black face than with a White face. L. L. Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure was applied to demonstrate that racial primes influenced automatic (A) processing, but not controlled (C) processing. The response deadline reduced the C estimate but not the A estimate. The motivation to control prejudice moderated the relationship between explicit prejudice and automatic bias. Implications are discussed on applied and theoretical levels.