A recent study published on a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications suggested that a tackleable mechanism within our brains explains the racial biases that lead to unarmed black people getting shot.
In 2020, Andre Hill (47), a black man, was shot and killed as he stepped out of his garage by a police officer who was responding to a non-emergency call about someone sitting in a car turning it on and off. Hill was armed not with a gun but a mobile phone that he held up as he left the garage.
In 2022 in the same city Donovan Lewis (20), a black man, was shot and killed just moments after a police officer opened his bedroom door. Why? The officer thought he was armed - with a vape.
Neither officer was new, both had decades of experience in the force under their belts - so how could this happen? What made them both make the split second decision that ended an innocent young life?
This new study suggests that there is a different neurological response in people of all races when they see the same tool associated with the face of a black or white person. It points to the neurological response when a black face is associated with the tool having close similarities to the response to an actual gun.
How did they carry out the study?
The initial study involved 32 participants with a mean age of 23, spanning 4 different non-black races and involved three separate tasks. They used functional MRI (fMRI) to observe the neurological responses to the images.
The first task was pattern localization. Participants were presented with an image of only a gun or a tool and had to identify which it was. At this point in the study race had not been mentioned and no faces were shown. The data from this stage shows the neurological response to a gun compared to that of a tool.
The second task was weapon identification. Participants are shown an image of a black or white face, immediately followed by a gun or a tool which they had to identify. These are referred to as black/white-primed tools.
The final task was control identification. Participants were shown a black or white face followed by a picture of leftwards or rightwards leaning diagonal lines and had to identify which direction the lines faced.
The results
The data showed that when seeing a black-primed tool, the participants' brain would react as if it had been shown a gun and they would have a delayed response time before correctly identifying the tool or would misidentify it entirely as a gun.
By comparing the fMRIs of the initial pattern localization task with the weapon identification task the researchers could see that participants' brains were responding to the black-primed tool similarly to their response to the unaccompanied gun. This suggests that participants may even experience visual distortion, temporarily seeing the tool as a gun when it is black-primed.
To measure response time the study discounts any misidentifications, comparing the time taken to correctly identify a black-primed tool to the time taken to correctly identify a white-primed tool.
They found a noticeably delayed response before correctly identifying a black-primed tool - suggesting that even in participants who were able to check their biases the split-second decision could have led to those so often fatal shots by police against unarmed black people in the US.
The study was replicated with a wider participant group including black people, producing the same results; highlighting that weapon bias doesn’t vary significantly across participant races.
What are the implications of this study?
The study can be used to help reduce the unnecessary deaths of unarmed black people as it locates what the neurological cause of this is, allowing for the possibility of interventions in officer behaviors before the event is allowed to happen.
Police officers make split-second decisions on a daily basis. This study shows that the split-second neurological response to a black face and a tool is most similar to the neurological response to a gun - a conscious decision must be made to recognize that there is no gun.
The authors say “recent work using extensive, multi-week ‘habit-breaking’ interventions have shown long-lasting effects” towards changing this impulse response; however this intervention has had mixed results thus far.
They suggest that if racial bias is (as the study shows) affecting visual perceptions of the world, this could open up a new form of visually based interventions that target these perceptions.
The study hopes to usher in a new age of policing, safer for innocent and unarmed black people who have been disproportionately mistreated as armed. This will help make society safer for all in the future.