Psychological study proves that people are more likely to shoot unarmed targets when they're black
Trayvon Martin’s Psychological Killer: Why We See Guns That Aren’t There
By Melanie Tannenbaum | March 26, 2012
When George Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin walking down the street in Sanford, Florida, he quickly assumed that the Black, hoodie-clad teenager was carrying a weapon. He then pulled out his gun and fatally shot the young student, whose hands were gripping nothing more than a bag of Skittles.
The fact that George Zimmerman assumed so quickly that Trayvon Martin was armed smacks of the worst kind of prejudice and racism. It is a tragic assumption that led to the death of an innocent young student, who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, unfortunately, a 2002 study by psychologist Joshua Correll suggests that the average, run-of-the-mill college student might have acted the exact same way.
If you had a split second to decide whether or not to shoot someone in front of you, do you think you would shoot? Do you think the other person’s skin color would matter? To test the idea that people might respond differently to Black and White targets, Correll and colleagues designed a first-person shooting game to test how ordinary people might make the split-second decision to either shoot or not shoot a potentially armed target, otherwise known as the Police Officer’s Dilemma.
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The researchers ultimately found a clear case of what they termed shooter bias. Over a series of four studies, participants were faster to (correctly) shoot an armed target when he was Black, and faster to (correctly) decide not to shoot an unarmed target when he was White. But the truly interesting and tragic finding lies in what happened when people decided to shoot the target when he was actually holding nothing more than a wallet or a cell phone, much like what happened in the real-life case of Trayvon Martin. As it turns out, the participants were consistently more likely to accidentally shoot unarmed targets when they were Black.
Read more: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/03/26/trayvon-martins-psychological-killer-why-we-see-guns-that-arent-there/
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dkf
(37,305 posts)This scenario doesn't sound like any we've been told about.
Cali_Democrat
(30,439 posts)and thought he was carrying something in his waistband. You can hear it on the tapes.
Later on AFTER he gunned down Trayvon, he told the police that Trayvon tried to go for his gun. But the initial bias is the fact that he thought Trayvon had some kind of weapon when he had nothing more than a cell phone, skittles and an iced tea.
Why did he initially view Trayvon as suspicious and why did he think he had something in his waistband? This study explains those types of biases.
dkf
(37,305 posts)Cali_Democrat
(30,439 posts)If two people have guns, one white and one black, it's easier to see if the white person has a gun?
dkf
(37,305 posts)On the other hand if guns were white maybe it would be the opposite way around. Maybe they should try that as an experiment. Then they could separate the pure optics from what the brain inserts.
