Good Cop, Bad Cop: Race-Based Differences in Mental Representations of Police

Abstract

<jats:p> The current work investigates race-based biases in conceptualization of the facial appearance of police. We employ a reverse correlation procedure to demonstrate that Black Americans, relative to White Americans, conceptualize police officers’ faces as more negative, less positive, and more dominant. We further find that these differential representations have implications for interactions with police. When naïve participants (of various races) viewed images of police officers generated by Black Americans (relative to those generated by White Americans), they responded with greater anticipated anxiety and reported more fight-or-flight behavioral intentions. Across four studies, findings suggest Black and White Americans conceptualize police and police–citizen interactions fundamentally differently. These findings have important theoretical (e.g., using reverse correlation to document the mental representations held by minority group members) and practical implications (e.g., identifying race-based differences in representations of police that may affect community–police relations). </jats:p>

Conceptual Development and Change Precede Adults’ Judgments About Powerful Appearance

“…In addition to developing a more complete picture of people's judgments across the lifespan, we must strive to understand how individual differences in people's social experiences shape the social meaning that they ascribe to others' appearance. For example, Black and White North American adults possess different mental representations of faces belonging to police officers (Lloyd et al 2020). When Black and White adults are asked to construct images of officer faces, naïve observers rate the images generated by Black adults as more "dominant" and "negative" than those generated by White adults.…”

“…A proximal source of these differences are the diverging experiencedependent attitudes that Black and White North Americans have about law enforcement and institutional authority (Berthelot et al 2018;Brunson and Weitzer 2009;Carr et al n.d.;Lee et al 2010). Indeed, more formal models of social perception have begun describing how stereotypic expectations of others based on social identities (e.g., race) and social roles (e.g., being a police officer) influence social perception at many levels (Freeman and Ambady 2011;Hehman et al 2017Hehman et al , 2019Lloyd et al 2020;Stolier et al 2018Stolier et al , 2020. These expectations shape how we interpret both inherent and momentary aspects of facial appearance (Collova et al 2019;Kunstman et al 2016;Lloyd et al 2017a, b;Sutherland et al 2019).…”

Conceptual development and change precede adults’ judgments about powerful appearance

“…In addition to developing a more complete picture of people's judgments across the lifespan, we must strive to understand how individual differences in people's social experiences shape the social meaning that they ascribe to others' appearance. For example, Black and White North American adults possess different mental representations of faces belonging to police officers (Lloyd, Sim, Smalley, Bernstein, & Hugenberg, 2020). When Black and White adults are asked to construct images of officer faces, naïve observers rate the images generated by Black adults as more "dominant" and "negative" than those generated by White adults.…”

“…M. Lee, Steinberg, & Piquero, 2010). Indeed, more formal models of social perception have begun describing how stereotypic expectations of others based on social identities (e.g., race) and social roles (e.g., being a police officer) influence social perception at many levels (Freeman & Ambady, 2011;Hehman, Stolier, Freeman, Flake, & Xie, 2019;Hehman, Sutherland, Flake, & Slepian, 2017;Lloyd et al, 2020;Stolier, Hehman, & Freeman, 2018; 2020). These expectations shape how we interpret both inherent and momentary aspects of facial appearance (Collova, Sutherland, & Rhodes, 2019;Kunstman, Tuscherer, Trawalter, & Lloyd, 2016;Lloyd, Hugenberg, McConnell, Kunstman, & Deska, 2017a;Lloyd, Kunstman, Tuscherer, & Bernstein, 2017b;Sutherland, Rhodes, Burton, & Young, 2019).…”

Introducing the Brief Reverse Correlation

“…Over the years, the procedure has become widespread in social psychology and has proven to be particularly useful to identify the diagnostic features that drive social perception or to examine how top-down processes can bias mental images of social targets (see Brinkman et al, 2017;Jack & Schyns, 2017;Todorov et al, 2011;Todorov et al , 2013). For instance, it contributed to uncover facial diagnostic components of social categories such as ethnicity and race (e.g., Dotsch et al, 2008;Hinzman & Maddox, 2017;Krosch & Amodio, 2014;Kunst, Dovidio et al, 2017), gender (e.g., Brooks et al, 2018;Degner et al, 2019;Gundersen & Kunst, 2018), country of origin (e.g., Imhoff et al, 2011), profession and occupation (e.g., Degner et al, 2019;Lloyd et al, 2020), age (e.g., Albohn & Adams, 2020), religion (e.g., Brown-Iannuzzi et al, 2018) but also personality traits (e.g, Lin et al, 2018;Oliveira et al, 2019), and emotions (e.g., Albohn & Adams, 2020;Brooks et al, 2018). Furthermore, the RC method provides insights on how these mental templates could be distorted by a priori preferences, attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge, such as political ideology (e.g., Jackson et al, 2018;Young et al, 2013), love and attraction (e.g., Gunaydin & DeLong, 2015;Karremans et al, 2011), stereotypes and prejudice (e.g., Brown-Iannuzzi et al, 2016;Brown-Iannuzzi et al, 2018;Dotsch et al, 2008;Hinzman & Maddox, 2017), group membership (e.g., Hong & Ratner, 2020;Ratner et al, 2014), dehumanization (Kunst, Kteily et al, 2017;…”