Quick shoot decisions bias toward shooting unarmed Black individuals

Evidence

In 1995, Amadou Diallo was shot forty-one times by officers from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) (Cooper, 1999). The officers thought he was reaching for a gun, when in fact he had reached into his pocket to retrieve a cell phone. The event spurred a flurry of psychological research examining the possibility of racial bias in shoot/ don’t shoot decisions, demonstrating that when making quick shoot/don’t shoot decisions, lay participants were more likely to make errors by shooting unarmed Black individuals and failing to shoot armed White individuals (Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002). The bias in these quick decisions to shoot an unarmed individual may be the result of a commonly held stereotypic association between Black individuals and aggressive behavior and/ or criminality (e. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 858

Categorization

• SEED: Potential angle: how the Diallo shooting catalyzed a whole laboratory paradigm (Correll et al.) and what that lab work does and doesn’t capture about real police force decisions.