White civilians' implicit danger evaluation of police officers underlies explicit perception of police.

ABSTRACT: 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-dange

SUBMITTER: Olivett VJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8688646 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature