Consider
the following cases:
● William J.
Whitfield, 22, shot to death in a supermarket in 1997 while holding his car
keys.
● Amadou Diallo, 23, killed in a flurry of
gunfire outside his apartment building in 1999 while reaching for his wallet.
● Julian Alexander, a 20-year-old newlywed,
killed in front of his home in 2008 while holding a wooden stick he was using
to fix curtains.
● Bernard Moore, a 73-year-old grandfather
shot to death on the front porch of his home as he held an energy drink bottle.
In all of these instances, the victims were
Black men, shot by police officers who mistook the harmless object they were holding
for a weapon. In those cases, in which investigations have been completed, the
police officers were cleared of wrongdoing. Juries and judges concluded that
they had made terrible but honest mistakes. These and similar cases have
incited critical public interest. What role did race play in these “honest”
perceptual mistakes? Social psychologist
Keith Payne examined how race affects the tendency to misperceive harmless
objects as handguns (Payne, 2001, 2010; Stokes & Payne, 2010). Participants
were told that they would see two pictures on a computer screen. Their job was
to decide, very quickly, whether the second picture was a gun or a tool. The
first picture—always a picture of an African American man or a White man—cued
the participants that the judgment was coming. Participants were more likely to
misperceive tools as guns when the tools were shown after a picture of an
African American man. I n another study, 48 police officers, Whites and African
Americans, played a video game in which they had to decide whether to shoot or
not shoot the suspects in the game (Plant & Peruche, 2005). The suspects
were African American or White and were holding guns or other objects.
The
researchers were interested in whether practice with the game, in which African
American and White suspects were randomly determined to be holding a gun or
another object—would help the officers become less biased in their perceptions.
Would experience with the fact that there was no systematic relation between
ethnicity and whether a person was likely to be armed reduce the tendency to
perceive harmless objects as guns? In the early trials the police officers,
regardless of their own race, were more likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed
suspect when he was African American. By the experiment’s end, however, this
tendency had faded, and the officers treated African American and White suspects
with equal levels of restraint. In the real-world cases mentioned above, the
police officers’ mistakes may have been honest, but they were not inevitable.
Such cases highlight the crucial role of cultural beliefs and the social world
in the process of perception. Individuals in a society that does not view
ethnic minority individuals as dangerous or as likely to be criminals might be
less inclined to misperceive car keys, a wallet, or a bottle as a weapon—and
might avoid these tragedies
Excerpt from laura king pg. 108
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