The ability of police and jurors to make informed, unbiased decisions is paramount to the integrity of the legal system. Police and jurors as decision-makers follow procedures ensuring that individuals receive a fair trial from the time of arrest to sentencing. However this process has come under public scrutiny with recent negative media attention focused on police shootings, aggressive handling or interrogation of suspects, and jurors' seemingly biased treatment of minority group members. Most researchers studying factors that motivate police and juror behavior focus on the external influences of decision-making, such as the climate of violence in a neighborhood, or culturally-entrenched criminal stereotypes. Fewer have focused on the cognitive factors that impact the internal decision-making processes. In this review we compile the research on individual differences in cognitive ability (e.g., working memory capacity) and event circumstances (e.g., high emotion, attention load), that influence police and jury decision-making. The majority of studies in this area are laboratory-based which may attenuate the transfer of findings to real-world settings, but cognitive mechanisms engaged in the field are likely similar. Overall, this review suggests that overload of cognitive capacity reduces controlled processing ability, which may work to undermine the reliability of decision-making at all phases of the legal process. Field studies are needed to better understand when decision-makers may be overburdened, and what interventions are most appropriate.

Negative biases associating Black men with criminality are most pronounced for a subgroup of men with Afrocentric features (e.g., a wide nose, full lips). Face-type bias occurs for men with these features because they are readily categorized as stereotypically Black and representative of the category Black male. This categorization in turn makes this subgroup more likely to be associated with the criminal-Black-male stereotype than are men with non-stereotypical Black features. In this review, we discuss what features engender the stereotypical Black face, the association between stereotypical features and assumed criminality, and when this bias may lead to negative judgments and potential legal consequences.

Prior research indicates that stereotypical Black faces (e.g., wide nose, full lips: Afrocentric) are often associated with crime and violence. The current study investigated whether stereotypical faces may bias the interpretation of facial expression to seem threatening. Stimuli were prerated by face type (stereotypical, nonstereotypical) and expression (neutral, threatening). Later in a forced-choice task, different participants categorized face stimuli as stereotypical or not and threatening or not. Regardless of prerated expression, stereotypical faces were judged as more threatening than were nonstereotypical faces. These findings were supported using computational models based on general recognition theory (GRT), indicating that decision boundaries were more biased toward the threatening response for stereotypical faces than for nonstereotypical faces. GRT analysis also indicated that perception of face stereotypicality and emotional expression are dependent, both across categories and within individual categories. Higher perceived stereotypicality predicts higher perception of threat, and, conversely, higher ratings of threat predict higher perception of stereotypicality. Implications for racial face-type bias influencing perception and decision-making in a variety of social and professional contexts are discussed.

This present study was designed to investigate whether face‐type (stereotypical or nonstereotypical) facilitates stereotype‐consistent categorization and decision‐making. Previous literature suggests an associative link between adults' stereotypically Black facial features and assumed criminality. The question addressed here is whether the cognitive processes that underpin biased decisions for an adult's racially stereotypical facial features (e.g., broad nose, full lips) apply to children's faces. In two studies, testing face‐type categorization and disciplinary judgments, people were more likely to miscategorize children with stereotypical faces into negative roles more than positive roles. People were also more likely to increase their disciplinary judgments from one infraction to another for children with stereotypical faces compared to nonstereotypical faces. These results suggest that face‐type cues do extend to children and also engender negative associations.