Jennifer L. Eberhardt, 49, an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, studies the effect of unconscious ideas about race on the workings of the criminal justice system. She was one of 21 winners of 2014 MacArthur genius grants.
Interest in her work has grown after the deaths of black suspects at the hands of police officers in Missouri and New York. We spoke for two hours in New York in September and again by telephone on Jan. 1. Here is an condensed and edited version of our conversations.
WHEN YOUR MACARTHUR WAS ANNOUNCED, IT WAS SAID YOU HAD SHOWN HOW CRIMINAL SENTENCING WAS RELATED TO SKIN COLOR AND RACIAL STEREOTYPING. HOW DID YOU DO THAT?
The particular study they were referring to was on the death penalty. We gathered photographs of people convicted of capital crimes and who were eligible for a death sentence. We then cropped them and asked Stanford students to rate how stereotypically black the faces appeared to be.
We told our subjects to use any dimension they wanted with which to make that judgment: skin color, width of nose, thickness of lips. Interestingly, though we didnt give them clear direction of what we meant by stereotypically black, there was a lot of agreement about what that was.
Now, the students had no idea where these pictures came from or that these were convicted felons. We wondered if their ratings of blackness could predict whether the person had received a life or a death sentence.
AND WERE THEY PREDICTIVE?
Oh, yes. People who were judged to be most black were, in reality, most likely to have drawn a death sentence. In fact, they were over twice as likely to get a death sentence.
YOUVE ALSO DONE STUDIES ON HOW PEOPLE PERCEIVE RACE AND WEAPONRY. WHAT DID YOU DISCOVER?
Theres one where we exposed people subliminally to black and white faces. We did this by sitting subjects in front of computer screens and exposing them to pictures of faces at such a rapid rate that they couldnt consciously detect what theyve been exposed to.
Then we displayed a blurry object on the screen. Sometimes, the object was crime-relevant a gun or a knife. At other times, it was crime-irrelevant a stapler. In 41 frames, this blurry object moved into focus.
Our participants told us that when theyd been exposed to the black faces beforehand, they were able to identify the crime-relevant objects quicker. Exposure to the white faces led them to need more frames to say, Thats a gun.
WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THIS?
Seeing a lot of black faces created a perceptual readiness to detect crime-related objects.
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN YOU HAD STUDENTS PLAY COMPUTER GAMES THAT CENTERED ON SHOOTING BLACK PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE CARRYING GUNS?
This is an experiment that another social psychologist, Josh Correll at the University of Colorado-Boulder, has done. But weve done it, too.
You have a computer game simulation where a subject sees someone holding an object. If its a gun, they hit a button labeled "Shoot. If its a harmless object, they hit another labeled "Dont Shoot."
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
It turns out that if they are shown a black person with a gun, theyll respond with "Shoot" faster than when flashed the image of a white person with a gun. People are more likely to mistakenly respond with "Shoot" to a black person with no gun than to a white person with no gun.
WHAT MOTIVATES YOU TO DO THIS KIND OF RESEARCH?
I grew up in an all-black neighborhood in Cleveland. One day, my parents announced we were moving. The new junior high school was mostly white. That really shook me. The neighborhoods werent that far apart, but everything was different.
And that raised questions for me, for the first time, about how people can live such different lives.
WERE PEOPLE NOT NICE TO YOU?
People were nice. But different! People always joke that all black people look alike. All of them looked alike to me, which was a real handicap because I wanted to have friends but I couldnt tell who Id met the day before. I wasnt practiced at sorting those faces.
The funny thing is that today, one of the things I study is face recognition, and maybe because thats a kind of a metaphor for race relations. Not being able to read another persons face it symbolizes a psychological distance that makes it difficult to understand the experiences of another group.
I think about this often in terms of tensions between the police and the community and the trouble they have in reading one another.
IN OFFICER DARREN WILSONS TESTIMONY BEFORE THE FERGUSON, MO., GRAND JURY, HE DESCRIBED MICHAEL BROWN AS LOOKING LIKE A DEMON. IS THIS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT YOU MEAN?
I dont want to speak directly on that particular case. I dont know all the details, and maybe well never know. However, we have done work in my lab on how African-Americans can be dehumanized in these types of encounters.
For instance, African-Americans have long been associated with the pejorative words ape and gorilla. So we have studies where we show clips of police officers using force on a suspect.
In the clip, you cant tell the race of the person being beaten. Then we expose the research subjects to words associated with apes and gorillas. If the suspect turns out to be black, the use of force is justified by our research subjects more often than if our subjects hadnt been exposed to those words.
Were finding that the beliefs of the police arent generally that different from everyone elses. A lot of the tests weve done, we give them to students, to ordinary citizens and to police officers. Were finding the results are generally similar. The police are people like everyone else.
ALL THIS DATA YOU COLLECT WHAT DO YOU DO WITH IT?
One thing I do is work with police departments. We do workshops where we present these studies and show what implicit bias is, and how its different from old-fashioned r****m. I dont think this alone can change behavior. But it can help people become aware of the unconscious ways race operates. If you combine that with other things, there is hope.
Jennifer L. Eberhardt, 49, an associate professor ... (
show quote)