Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T17:48:01.610Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

CRIME ALERT!

How Thinking about a Single Suspect Automatically Shifts Stereotypes toward an Entire Group

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2008

Scott A. Akalis ,
Mahzarin R. Banaji  and
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Scott A. Akalis*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Harvard University
Mahzarin R. Banaji
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Harvard University
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Harvard University
*
Scott A. Akalis, 21 South Clark Street, Suite 2900, Chicago, IL 60603. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Crime alerts are meant to raise community awareness and identify individual criminal suspects; they are not expected to affect attitudes and beliefs toward the social group to which an individual suspect belongs. However, psychological principles of learning, categorization, and memory predict that what is learned about an instance can color perception of an entire category. At the intersection of psychology, criminal justice, sociology, and media studies, two experiments were conducted to test the effect that providing individual racial identity in crime alerts has on racial group stereotypes. In Experiment 1, participants visualized four scenarios involving Black or White would-be criminals. Results revealed that in the case where Black would-be criminals were made salient in memory, participants demonstrated significantly more negative implicit stereotypes toward Blacks as a group compared with a condition in which White would-be criminals were more salient in memory. In Experiment 2, participants read a written description of a crime scene with a suspect who was either depicted as White or Black, and then imagined the suspect. On both implicit and explicit measures of group stereotypes obtained afterward, participants who read about a Black criminal reported and revealed more anti-Black/pro-White stereotypes than did those who read about a White criminal. Crime alerts that mention racial identity, whatever their benefit, come with the burden of shifting stereotypes of social groups. In this context, the value of racial identification in crime alerts warrants reconsideration.

Keywords

StereotypesImplicit AttitudesCrimeIATSocial CognitionImagery
Type
STATE OF THE ART
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Fall 2008 , pp. 217 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Allport, Gordon W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Amodio, David M. and Devine, Patricia G. (2006). Stereotyping and Evaluation in Implicit Race Bias: Evidence for Independent Constructs and Unique Effects on Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(4): 652–661.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barden, Jamie, Maddux, William W., Petty, Richard E., and Brewer, Marilynn B. (2004). Contextual Moderation of Racial Bias: The Impact of Social Roles on Controlled and Automatically Activated Attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(1): 5–22.Google Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence W. (1999). Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(4): 577–609.Google Scholar
Blair, Irene V. (2002). The Malleability of Automatic Stereotypes and Prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6(3): 242–261.Google Scholar
Blair, Irene V., Ma, Jennifer E., and Lenton, Alison P. (2001). Imagining Stereotypes Away: The Moderation of Implicit Stereotypes through Mental Imagery. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(5): 828–841.Google Scholar
Correll, Joshua, Park, Bernadette, Judd, Charles M., and Wittenbrink, Bernd (2002). The Police Officer's Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6): 1314–1329.Google Scholar
Dasgupta, Nilanjana and Greenwald, Anthony G. (2001). On the Malleability of Automatic Attitudes: Combating Automatic Prejudice with Images of Admired and Disliked Individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(5): 800–814.Google Scholar
Dixon, Travis L. (2008). Network News and Racial Beliefs: Exploring the Connection between National Television News Exposure and Stereotypical Perceptions of African Americans. Journal of Communication, 58(2): 321–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ebbinghaus, Hermann (1913). Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. Trans. Ruger, Henry A. and Bussenius, Clara E.. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.Google Scholar
Entman, Robert M. (1990). Modern Racism and the Images of Blacks in Local Television News. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 7(4): 332–345.Google Scholar
Entman, Robert M. (1992). Blacks in the News: Television, Modern Racism and Cultural Change. Journalism Quarterly, 69(2): 341–361.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenwald, Anthony G. and Banaji, Mahzarin R. (1995). Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-Esteem, and Stereotypes. Psychological Review, 102(1): 4–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenwald, Anthony G., McGhee, Debbie E., and Schwartz, Jordan L. K. (1998). Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6): 1464–1480.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenwald, Anthony G., Nosek, Brian A., and Banaji, Mahzarin R. (2003a). Understanding and Using the Implicit Association Test: I. An Improved Scoring Algorithm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2): 197–216.Google Scholar
Greenwald, Anthony G., Oakes, Mark A., and Hoffman, Hunter G. (2003b). Targets of Discrimination: Effects of Race on Responses to Weapons Holders. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39: 399–405.Google Scholar
Greenwald, Anthony G., Poehlman, T. Andrew, Uhlmann, Eric Luis, and Banaji, Mahzarin R. (Forthcoming). Understanding and Interpreting the Implicit Association Test III: Meta-analysis of Predictive Validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.Google Scholar
Henderson-King, Eaaron I. and Nisbett, Richard E. (1996). Anti-Black Prejudice as a Function of Exposure to the Negative Behavior of a Single Black Person. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(4): 654–664.Google Scholar
Kosslyn, Stephen M., Seger, Carol, Pani, John R., and Hillger, Lynn A. (1990). When Is Imagery Used in Everyday Life? A Diary Study. Journal of Mental Imagery, 14: 131–152.Google Scholar
Lewicki, Pawel (1985). Nonconscious Biasing Effects of Single Instances on Subsequent Judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48(3): 563–574.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Logan, Gordon D. (1989). Automaticity and Cognitive Control. In Uleman, James S. and Bargh, John A. (Eds.), Unintended Thought, pp. 52–74. New York: Guilford.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Jason P., Nosek, Brian A., and Banaji, Mahzarin R. (2003). Contextual Variations in Implicit Evaluation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132(3): 455–469.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nosek, Brian A., Smyth, Frederick L., Hansen, Jeffrey J., Devos, Thierry, Lindner, Nicole M., Ranganath, Kate A., Smith, Colin T., Olson, Kristina R., Chugh, Dolly, Greenwald, Anthony G., and Banaji, Mahzarin R. (2007). Pervasiveness and Correlates of Implicit Attitudes and Stereotypes. European Review of Social Psychology, 18: 36–88.Google Scholar
Oliver, Mary Beth and Fonash, Dana (2002). Race and Crime in the News: Whites' Identification and Misidentification of Criminal Suspects. Media Psychology, 4(2): 137–156.Google Scholar
Payne, B. Keith (2001). Prejudice and Perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Misperceiving a Weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(2): 181–192.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Plant, E. Ashby, Peruche, B. Michelle, and Butz, David A. (2005). Eliminating Automatic Racial Bias: Making Race Non-diagnostic for Responses to Criminal Suspects. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41(2): 141–156.Google Scholar
Quattrone, George A. and Jones, Edward E. (1980). The Perception of Variability within In-Groups and Out-Groups: Implications for the Law of Small Numbers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(1): 141–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothbart, Myron and Lewis, Scott (1988). Inferring Category Attributes from Exemplar Attributes: Geometric Shapes and Social Categories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(6): 861–872.Google Scholar
Rydell, Robert J. and McConnell, Allen R. (2006). Understanding Implicit and Explicit Attitude Change: A Systems of Reasoning Analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(6): 995–1008.Google Scholar
Sekaquaptewa, Denise, Espinoza, Penelope, Thompson, Mischa, Vargas, Patrick, and von Hippel, William (2003). Stereotypic Explanatory Bias: Implicit Stereotyping as a Predictor of Discrimination. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(1): 75–82.Google Scholar
Smith, Eliot R. (1998). Mental Representation and Memory. In Gilbert, Daniel T., Fiske, Susan T., and Lindzey, Gardner (Eds.), Vol. 1 of Handbook of Social Psychology, 4th ed., pp. 391–445. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Tversky, Amos and Kahneman, Daniel (1973). Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5: 207–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wittenbrink, Bernd, Judd, Charles M., and Park, Bernadette (2001). Spontaneous Prejudice in Context: Variability in Automatically Activated Attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(5): 815–827.Google Scholar
Wright, Anthony A., Santiago, Héctor C., Sands, Stephen F., Kendrick, Donald F., and Cook, Robert G. (1985). Memory Processing of Serial Lists by Pigeons, Monkeys, and People. Science, 229: 287–289.Google Scholar