Abstract
The role of implicit processes during police-civilian encounters is well studied from the perspective of the police. Decades of research on the “shooter bias” suggests that implicit Black-danger associations potentiate the perception of threat of Black individuals, leading to a racial bias in the decision to use lethal force. Left understudied are civilians’ possible associations of police with danger and how such associations pervade behavior and explicit views of the police. The current work begins to address this gap. In two within-subjects studies, we separately assess police-threat (i.e., safety/danger) and police-valence (i.e., good/bad) associations as well as their relative influences on explicit perceptions of police. Study 1 revealed that implicit threat evaluations (police-danger associations) more strongly predicted negative explicit views of the police compared to implicit valence evaluations (police-negative associations). Study 2 replicated these findings and suggests that individuals evaluate the police as more dangerous versus negative when each response is pitted against each other within single misattribution procedure trials. The possible implications for explicit attitudes toward police reform and behavior during police-civilian encounters are discussed.
Highlights
A large body of work exploring mechanisms underlying police attitudes and behavior during police-civilian interactions typically focus on anti-Black bias as a source of violent outcomes (e.g., Correll et al, 2007; Payne & Correll, 2020; Plant & Peruche, 2005)
This work generally posits that stereotypes linking Black with danger underlie the “shooter bias”
Exploring how the processes underlying policecivilian interactions from the civilian perspective are influenced by perceptions of police as a threat highlights another important path by which police violence perpetuates wider systemic societal injustice
Summary
A large body of work exploring mechanisms underlying police attitudes and behavior during police-civilian interactions typically focus on anti-Black bias as a source of violent outcomes (e.g., Correll et al, 2007; Payne & Correll, 2020; Plant & Peruche, 2005). This work generally posits that stereotypes linking Black with danger underlie the “shooter bias” (a propensity in laboratory studies for participants [often including Police] to more frequently shoot unarmed Black compared to White men; Correll et al, 2002, 2007). We propose that just as police may (mis)perceive civilians as a survival threat due to preexisting danger associations, civilians may analogously perceive police as a survival threat due to established danger associations. From this perspective, whereas the cognitive roots of systemic police violence are relatively more understood, the cognitive fallout is not. Exploring how the processes underlying policecivilian interactions from the civilian perspective are influenced by perceptions of police as a threat highlights another important path by which police violence perpetuates wider systemic societal injustice
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