Some of the stereotypes that prevail in a given geographic area go unrecognized by the people who hold them, and even more often, theyre not acknowledged. But psychologists know that such bias is widespread.
New research finds that when more white people in a community hold African Americans in greater suspicion, that prevailing view may influence police behavior in ways that drive the outsize use of lethal force against African Americans by cops.
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In a study published Thursday, a trio of psychologists built a map of the racial bias and stereotypes that prevail among whites across the United States. They gathered individuals answers to a pair of online tests that measure implicit bias and stereotypes about black and white people. [Then], they arranged them in geographical clusters according to the recorded location of the test-taker.
When the researchers overlaid those maps with their hot spots of white racial bias and presumption of violent intent against African Americans, they discerned a strong correlation with a very different map: one showing where, in the first nine months of 2015, African Americans were killed by police in disproportionate numbers.
The study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, was conducted by psychologists Eric Hehman and Jessica K. Flake of Ryerson and York universities, respectively, in Toronto, and by UC Davis social psychologist Jimmy Calanchini.
It relied upon millions of individuals scores on online tests taken between 2003 and 2013. Those quizzes use word associations and time pressure to capture beliefs and associations that people hold and make without always being aware of those biases. The researchers also used a database of people killed by police in the United States (called The Counted) that has been compiled by the the Guardian newspaper since the start of 2015.
Of the two measures of community belief implicit racial bias and a stereotyped view that black people are more threatening than whites the latter was a better predictor of disproportionate police killings of black people. When many more white people in a given community revealed in tests that they considered black people more threatening than whites, that community was more likely to have rates of lethal force against black people that were out of proportion to their numbers in the local population.
