{"id":2906,"date":"2013-07-28T17:21:34","date_gmt":"2013-07-28T21:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/?p=2906"},"modified":"2013-07-28T17:21:34","modified_gmt":"2013-07-28T21:21:34","slug":"prejudices-creating-illusory-guns-a-bigger-problem-than-zimmermans-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/2013\/07\/28\/prejudices-creating-illusory-guns-a-bigger-problem-than-zimmermans-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"Prejudices creating illusory guns-a bigger problem than Zimmerman’s racism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Guilty until proven otherwise<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Scientific American <\/a>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.<\/p>\n

If you had a split second to decide whether or not to shoot someone\u00a0 in front of you, do you think you would shoot? Do you think the other\u00a0 person\u2019s skin color would matter? To test the idea that people might\u00a0 respond differently to Black and White targets, Correll and colleagues\u00a0 designed a first-person shooting game to test how ordinary people might\u00a0 make the split-second decision to either shoot or not shoot a\u00a0 potentially armed target, otherwise known as the Police Officer\u2019s Dilemma<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Groups of college students were told that a series of people would\u00a0 come on the screen in front of them and would either be holding a gun or\u00a0 a neutral object, like a wallet, aluminum can, or cell phone. If the\u00a0 participants correctly shot an armed target, they would receive 10\u00a0 points; if they correctly refrained from shooting an unarmed target, they would\u00a0 receive 5 points. Shooting an unarmed target deducted 20 points, and not\u00a0 shooting an armed target \u2013 the most potentially dangerous outcome for a\u00a0 real police officer on the streets \u2013 would result in the harshest\u00a0 penalty of all, a 40-point deduction.<\/p>\n

As each target appeared on screen, participants had to decide as\u00a0 quickly as possible if the target was holding a gun or a harmless\u00a0 object by pushing buttons labeled either \u201cShoot\u201d or \u201cDon\u2019t Shoot.\u201d Unbeknownst to participants, the\u00a0 researchers had manipulated one critical feature of the targets \u2013 some\u00a0 of the targets were White, and some of the targets were Black.<\/p>\n

The researchers ultimately found a clear case of what they termed shooter bias<\/em>.\u00a0 Over a series of four studies, participants were faster to (correctly)\u00a0 shoot an armed target when he was Black, and faster to (correctly)\u00a0 decide not to shoot an unarmed target when he was White. But the truly\u00a0 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\u00a0 more likely to accidentally shoot an unarmed target when he was Black.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sad as this finding was, it perhaps wasn’t entirely surprising. But here is the more important finding.<\/p>\n

When the \u201cshooting game\u201d task was given to\u00a0 Black participants, they were just as likely to accidentally\u00a0 shoot unarmed Black targets as the White participants were.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When you grow up in a culture that endorses certain stereotypes, they\u00a0 become ingrained in your cultural knowledge. Even if you don\u2019t actually endorse\u00a0 those stereotypes, they can still impact your behavior in horrifying ways.\u00a0 A study from the 1940s demonstrated that young Black girls often\u00a0 preferred to play with White-skinned dolls over Black-skinned dolls,\u00a0 presumably because they were growing up in a culture endorsing the\u00a0 idea that White = Beautiful.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, it\u2019s not always about whether or not you<\/em> are racist, or whether or not you<\/em> think that Black people are violent. Cultural stereotypes can become\u00a0 automatically activated and applied to our behaviors even when we don\u2019t\u00a0 actually endorse them. The sheer knowledge that these stereotypes exist<\/em> can be enough to influence our judgments, especially when it comes to\u00a0 split-second decisions that often rely on heuristics and automatic mental associations. Because of cultural stereotypes, the shooters in\u00a0 Correll\u2019s games had a lower threshold for when they would decide it was\u00a0 OK to shoot at Black targets, even though most of them probably could not\u00a0 have told you that this was happening, and most of them would have been\u00a0 appalled to discover that they had unknowingly acted on these implicit biases.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The author proceeds to tell us the Martin case was about more than this.<\/p>\n

As an astute commenter notes, this is not a perfect example of the Police Officer\u2019s 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<\/a> 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u00a0 to excuse everything, as long as God’s involvement is somehow invoked, does not help either.
\nhttp:\/\/youtu.be\/eZxpwb0UYuk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Scientific American has an interesting piece about the tragic death of Travon Martin, and subsequent acquittal of his killer,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/nocrossnocrescent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}