Everyday racist calls may stem from ambiguity rather than explicit bias

Evidence

The reason why interventions such as the recent Oregon bill are being put into place is that many of these instances of community enforcement of racial bias could be attributed to explicit discriminatory behaviors toward Black Americans and other minority groups. Nevertheless, research on this specific phenomenon is currently lacking and makes it difficult to establish exactly what this process entails and whether it is always explicit bias that drives these calls. We propose that the nature of this phenomenon, which involves multiple stages and agents, opens up the possibility for bias to carry over from one person to another, particularly when the source of threat is ambiguous and open to interpretation. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 297

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the folk assumption that racially profiling 911 calls are straight-up bigotry vs. the possibility that ambiguous threats let pre-existing bias ‘carry over’ between ordinary citizens — reframing who the responsible party is.
• QUESTION: Open question worth chasing: can bias transfer across multiple human agents in a chain (caller to dispatcher to responder) like a pass-along effect, and does ambiguity amplify that transfer?
• XREF: Relates to the reader’s interest in blame and moral responsibility attribution; also evokes work on ambiguous-threat perception and implicit bias spillover effects.