Training, Cognitive Control, and Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot

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This research explores racial bias in police officers' decisions to shoot by focusing on the impact of training and the importance of complexity of training stimuli. Racial biases influence police officers' willingness and readiness to shoot suspects. The investigators employ a videogame to examine racial bias in shoot/don't-shoot decisions with Black and White suspects who are either armed or unarmed. The experimental paradigm involves the presentation of images of men standing or crouching in various positions against several complicated backgrounds. Participants must identify a small object in the target's hand. Results of these exercises show that participants respond more quickly to targets consistent with stereotypes (armed Blacks, unarmed Whites) than to counter-stereotypic targets (armed Whites, and unarmed Blacks). In addition, these results show that participants set a more lenient threshold for the decision to shoot Black rather than White targets. That is, they are more willing to open fire when the target is Black. Importantly, the PIs' recent work shows that training minimizes racial bias in the Signal Detection threshold such that novices show pronounced bias, but highly trained individuals (police & "expert" participants) do not. Interestingly, training does not affect bias in reaction times as experts and novices both respond more slowly to counter-stereotypic than to stereotypic targets. It therefore seems that experts show some evidence of stereotype-based processing (which delays their responses to counter-stereotypic targets), but that their training enables them to override these stereotypes and, ultimately, execute decisions that are not affected by race. This research seeks to examine the processes through which training may reduce bias. The PIs contend that experts learn to extract task-relevant information from the visual field and use it to guide their decisions. The first section of the research program tests whether training can promote attention and effort. In the second section, whether training (and the control it fosters) can override racial stereotypes is examined. The final set of studies attempts to impair cognitive control through cognitive load, fatigue and fear. By compromising the mechanisms through which training operates, these manipulations should exacerbate bias even among experts. Findings should provide evidence of the conditions under which police officers' capacities are most likely to be impaired. The issues under consideration in this research are interesting and important and the findings are likely to have a significant impact in real-world settings. Together with the obvious educational impacts, the work has important implications for training programs in various domains.