An Investigation of Civilian Implicit Attitudes Toward Police Officers

Sargent, Rikki H.; Newman, Leonard S.

doi:10.1007/s11896-019-09330-9

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Exposure to media portrayals of police violence has been linked to negative evaluations of the police (Graziano, 2019 ) and a self-reported emotional fear response (Campbell & Valera, 2020 ). Conceptually similar results were found in a study measuring implicit associations linking police versus civilians to safety (e.g., comfort, peace, protection) versus fear (e.g., panic, concern, scared) on a word fragment completion task (Sargent & Newman, 2019 ). To White participants, police versus civilians were associated more with both personal safety and personal fear.…”

Section: Danger Associations and The Police-civilian Interactionsupporting

confidence: 76%

“…Despite this, almost no research has examined similar processes from the perspective of civilians (cf. Sargent & Newman, 2019 ). The present work began to address this gap by assessing civilians’ implicit threat and valence evaluations of the police, as well how each process predicts explicit perceptions of the police.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, negative police-associations—perhaps associating the police with racial bias—does not necessarily mean that one associates the police with danger. Based on previous research (Sargent & Newman, 2019 ), we expect that police are indeed associated with safety. To the extent that police are also associated with danger, evaluations of targets following police primes may reveal a mixed pattern of safety and danger responses.…”

Section: The Current Workmentioning

confidence: 96%

See 2 more Smart Citations

White civilians’ implicit danger evaluation of police officers underlies explicit perception of police

Olivett

March

2021

Cogn. Research

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The role of implicit processes during police-civilian encounters is well studied from the perspective of the police. Decades of research on the “shooter bias” suggests that implicit Black-danger associations potentiate the perception of threat of Black individuals, leading to a racial bias in the decision to use lethal force. Left understudied are civilians’ possible associations of police with danger and how such associations pervade behavior and explicit views of the police. The current work begins to address this gap. In two within-subjects studies, we separately assess police-threat (i.e., safety/danger) and police-valence (i.e., good/bad) associations as well as their relative influences on explicit perceptions of police. Study 1 revealed that implicit threat evaluations (police-danger associations) more strongly predicted negative explicit views of the police compared to implicit valence evaluations (police-negative associations). Study 2 replicated these findings and suggests that individuals evaluate the police as more dangerous versus negative when each response is pitted against each other within single misattribution procedure trials. The possible implications for explicit attitudes toward police reform and behavior during police-civilian encounters are discussed.