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[PLMS: The Project on Law & Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School]
[Conference on Law and Mind Sciences, March 10, 2007, Harvard Law School]
[Jennifer Eberhardt "Policing Racial Bias"]
Jennifer Eberhardt, I am proud to say is also one of Harvard's own
Um...after completing her PHD in Psychology here in 1993,
she went to Yale, for which we forgive her.
[Laughter] And assumed a joint faculty... [Laughter]
She forgives herself too..Um she assumed a joint faculty position
in Psychology and African and African-American studies.
She was also a research fellow at Yale's institute for Race
Inequality and Politics. Since moving to Stanford in 1998
she has conducted research in areas ranging from social neuroscience
to the intersection of psychology and the law.
Her scholarship explores the connection between our minds and our worlds.
In her most recent work, she examines how social representations of race
can affect viz..visual perception and neural processing.
She is currently a research fellow at the Center for Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity.
And she co-directs the Mind Culture and Society specialization track for advanced undergraduates.
I am honored to introduce, Jennifer Eberhardt.
[Clapping]
[Clapping]
Thank you for that introduction and thank you..uh..
all for inviting me. Uh...I had too much time on my
hands this morning, so I decided to...uh...um
clean off my computer desktop and I actually erased my talk, but...[giggle] [laughter]
[laughter] but I was able to get it together I think, again, so hopefully
uh...we'll just see how this goes...um [giggle]
okay...um so first let me...uh...present...uh... two dominate views on race
and talk about where my work is situated. Um...so...um
One view on race is that race is absent...um...for a long time now,
we've known that most white Americans think about racial discrimination as a
thing of the past. Um...So most believe that discrimination against blacks
is no longer a problem. Most believe that blacks have equal
employment, education, and housing opportunities. Most think that blacks are
treated fairly. And most Americans, generally, claim that they never experience
negative thoughts or emotions when they encounter people from different races.
Now according to the general social survey
only 17% of white Americans report being very concerned
about racial issues. Only 7% considered race one of
the nation's most important issues. And only 6%...um say that they think
about race very often. [Pause] From laboratory studies
on college campuses, we know that white students...uh... don't consider
race to be central or important at all to their personal identities.
Um and the average white student claims very few friends across race lines.
Uh...now based on these data...uh one could come away with
the impression that um race matters for very few white Americans
and for those for whom it does matter, it occupies them for a very
uh..limited number of circumstances or for a very limited amount of time.
Okay...so not only are white Americans inclined to think that they are racially unbiased
but they report that they're not inclined to think about race at all.
Now..uh my work is consistent
with lot's of other work in social psychology on racial bias and it stands
in stark contrast to this lay view on race. And the basic ideas
are that...uh that race can influence people more often than they think,
um that our attitudes and our beliefs about race can be processed implicitly.
So in circumstances where we don't even know we're thinking about race, we could be thinking
about race. And at times these attitudes and beliefs about race can
lead to negative consequences. Now uh..for the purpose
of today's talk, I'm going to um...focus on the racial associations
that uh... that involve African Americans. And...um
The studies in Part 2 all examine uh... the association of
blacks with crime. And the studies in Part 2 examine the association
of blacks with Animals. um... And the argument here is that
blacks are not only criminalized but they're also dehumanized
in ways that could lead to negative consequences in the criminal justice context.
Okay so first let's talk about
the association of blacks with crime. Um.. now of course there are dozens of things that
keep this association strong. But I'm gonna uh...quickly highlight three..um.
And the first is that the stereotype of uh blacks as hostile
or dangerous or criminal, Is one of the strongest stereotypes
of blacks in American society. It shows up in study after study.
And although not everyone actively endorses this stereotype...um
nearly everyone in our society has knowledge of its existence.
Second uh law enforcement practices underscore the relationship between race
and crime. This is a cartoon that I borrowed uh from the New Yorker.
And it uh shows these two cops. They're stopping this black guy,
they hold up this sketch and they say "You look like the sketch of someone whose
thinking about committing a crime"
Now this takes the use of race as a proxy for criminality
to the point of absurdity because that's what cartoons do
But using race um as a proxy for criminality is routinely practiced in law enforcement communities.
And it's perfectly legal as long as it's not the sole factor used.
Third, um actual crime statistics contribute
uh to an association of race and crime so this graph shows that uh
um that black males are grossly over-represented in prisons and in jails
relative to their numbers in the population. Okay.
And racial disparities like these have not escaped the popular press.
Um we hear these disparities reported over and over in news reports across the nation.
Okay so we have beliefs, we have practices and we have
this intense racial stratification all working together to support and strengthen
this association between race and crime.
And I'm going to argue that this black crime association is so strong
that it influences us in indirect and unexpected ways despite
our desire to be egalitarian.
Now all of the studies I'll present are uh relevant
to the criminal justice context and I'm gonna highlight their relevance as I move along.
Um many officer involved shootings involve the detection of a weapon.
Uh so for the first study my colleagues and I asked the question
Can simple exposure to black faces lead people to see weapons better?
Okay so to examine this, we invited male undergraduates,
white male undergraduates in uh to participate in a study.
And they were seated in front of a computer screen with a focus dot at the center.
And they're just asked to stare at that focus dot. And then there are flashes of light that
appear around that focus dot. And they're to tell us for each flash uh really
quickly whether that flash appeared on the left or the right of the computer screen.
And they do that just with a button push. Okay. Um...now...um.
Although the participants were seeing these flashes of light, some of the flashes were actually
faces of young men that were being uh flashed on the screen at such a rapid rate that
couldn't consciously detect them. Okay so here it is in slow motion
So..um... some of the participants were exposed
to an entire series of white male faces in this way. Some were exposed to
black male faces and then some to no faces at all. Okay.