The Scientific American has an interesting piece about the tragic death of Travon Martin, and subsequent acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman. While the author does not dispute the racist attitude shown by Zimmerman, she does give us evidence that the problem is deeper than that. First, some background.
If you had a split second to decide whether or not to shoot someone in front of you, do you think you would shoot? Do you think the other person’s skin color would matter? To test the idea that people might respond differently to Black and White targets, Correll and colleagues designed a first-person shooting game to test how ordinary people might make the split-second decision to either shoot or not shoot a potentially armed target, otherwise known as the Police Officer’s Dilemma.
Groups of college students were told that a series of people would come on the screen in front of them and would either be holding a gun or a neutral object, like a wallet, aluminum can, or cell phone. If the participants correctly shot an armed target, they would receive 10 points; if they correctly refrained from shooting an unarmed target, they would receive 5 points. Shooting an unarmed target deducted 20 points, and not shooting an armed target – the most potentially dangerous outcome for a real police officer on the streets – would result in the harshest penalty of all, a 40-point deduction.
As each target appeared on screen, participants had to decide as quickly as possible if the target was holding a gun or a harmless object by pushing buttons labeled either “Shoot” or “Don’t Shoot.” Unbeknownst to participants, the researchers had manipulated one critical feature of the targets – some of the targets were White, and some of the targets were Black.
The researchers ultimately found a clear case of what they termed shooter bias. Over a series of four studies, participants were faster to (correctly) shoot an armed target when he was Black, and faster to (correctly) decide not to shoot an unarmed target when he was White. But the truly interesting (and tragic) finding emerges when studying the cases where people accidentally chose to shoot targets who were holding wallets or cell phones. As it turns out, the participants were consistently more likely to accidentally shoot an unarmed target when he was Black.
Sad as this finding was, it perhaps wasn’t entirely surprising. But here is the more important finding.
When the “shooting game” task was given to Black participants, they were just as likely to accidentally shoot unarmed Black targets as the White participants were.
When you grow up in a culture that endorses certain stereotypes, they become ingrained in your cultural knowledge. Even if you don’t actually endorse those stereotypes, they can still impact your behavior in horrifying ways. A study from the 1940s demonstrated that young Black girls often preferred to play with White-skinned dolls over Black-skinned dolls, presumably because they were growing up in a culture endorsing the idea that White = Beautiful.
At the end of the day, it’s not always about whether or not you are racist, or whether or not you think that Black people are violent. Cultural stereotypes can become automatically activated and applied to our behaviors even when we don’t actually endorse them. The sheer knowledge that these stereotypes exist can be enough to influence our judgments, especially when it comes to split-second decisions that often rely on heuristics and automatic mental associations. Because of cultural stereotypes, the shooters in Correll’s games had a lower threshold for when they would decide it was OK to shoot at Black targets, even though most of them probably could not have told you that this was happening, and most of them would have been appalled to discover that they had unknowingly acted on these implicit biases.
The author proceeds to tell us the Martin case was about more than this.
As an astute commenter notes, this is not a perfect example of the Police Officer’s Dilemma as Zimmerman did not shoot Martin because he thought that Martin was reaching for a gun. In fact, the infamous case of Amadou Diallo would probably be a more appropriate example of this particular scenario, as the shooting in this case actually did involve Diallo reaching for a wallet and the police officers mistakenly assuming that he was reaching for a gun.
While some degree of overt racism will, unfortunately, likely be with us for quite some time, the problem with (occasionally) subconscious prejudices is even more sinister, and may be even harder to tackle. But of course, a culture that tends to excuse everything, as long as God’s involvement is somehow invoked, does not help either.
http://youtu.be/eZxpwb0UYuk
