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The situations in which unarmed black men were shot by mistake have frequently recurred over the past decades. It is a general opinion that black men are associated with crime and drugs and have more chances to be suspected of evil deeds and killed in the street by a police officer. There are many studies investigating a decision-making process that leads to the shooting. Some researchers state that racial bias plays a significant role in the decision to shoot and causes errors in identifying various objects in an individual’s hand as dangerous or suspicious (James, Klinger, & Vila, 2014). The analyzed article deals with studying the role of working memory capacity in threat-related situations and its impact on the police officer’s decision to shoot.
The major hypothesis tested in this research emphasizes that an individual’s actions in the threatening situation are connected with executive control, which reflects such an element of working memory as attentional control (Kleider, Parrott, & King, 2010). It means that individuals with high and low working memory capacity would react differently in the same situation related to danger. For this study, a police officer was chosen as a dependent variable, while a dangerous situation was chosen as an independent variable.
The subject of the study was limited to analyzing the shooting behavior of police officers in danger-related situations. For this purpose, various threatening situations were simulated to investigate the behavior of the participants. It was supposed that “individuals with low, relative to high, WM capacity likely possess a number of cognitive deficits, including fewer available cognitive resources to regulate behavior” (Kleider et al., 2010, p. 716).
The result of this research shows how different levels of working memory capacity influence the behavior of individuals. It is noted that every-day routine activity does not require a lot of mental efforts as it is performed automatically. Thus, a difference in the levels of working memory capacity is not so obvious as in threatening situations. The authors assume that in dangerous situations, people with lower working memory capacity tend to rely on automatic processes rather than control their actions knowingly (Kleider et al., 2010).
The main strong point of the article is that it discusses the reasons for shooting behavior in dangerous situations. These reasons are based on thorough scientific research which explains the abilities of police officers to make a controlled decision depending on their working memory capacity. It is supposed that officers with low capacity of working memory are more likely to shoot the unarmed individuals. This suggestion corresponds with the recent research on the influence of racism biases, which demonstrated that some officers were hesitating in shooting black suspects (James, James, & Vila, 2016).
Still, the study has not taken into account that the decisions made by police officers are based not only on the behavior of a suspect but also on racial stereotypes. Some researchers note that “people are typically faster when responding to stereotype-congruent information rather than stereotype-incongruent information” (Correll, Hudson, Guillermo, & Ma, 2014, p. 202). Therefore, shooting behavior is influenced not only by mental abilities of a police officer. It is also emphasized that intergroup bias is referred to a significant number of standard reactions to members that belong to the other group (Kawakami, Amodio, & Hugenberg, 2017).
The research in the analyzed article might be a basis for another expanded study of shooting behavior based on the further analysis of working memory capacities linked with the impact of racial bias on the process of decision-making among police officers. It is stated that implicit biases cause certain behavior and might influence the controlled processes (Ito et al., 2015). Thus, the hypothesis for the further study might be that decision-making process in dangerous situations involves both dorsal and ventral stream.
The article analyzed in the given paper is related to bottom-up and top-down processing in the brain, as well as prototype theory, studied in this course. It also discusses some of the brain functions such as working memory capacity. Some aspects of cognition as information processing are affected as well.
References
Correll, J., Hudson, S. M., Guillermo, S., & Ma, D. S. (2014). The police officer’s dilemma: A decade of research on racial bias in the decision to shoot. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8(5), 201-213.
James, L., Klinger, D., & Vila, B. (2014). Racial and ethnic bias in decisions to shoot seen through a stronger lens: Experimental results from high-fidelity laboratory simulations. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 10(3), 323-340.
James, L., James, S. M., & Vila, B. J. (2016). The reverse racism effect. Criminology & Public Policy, 15(2), 457-479.
Ito, T. A., Friedman, N. P., Bartholow, B. D., Correll, J., Loersch, C., Altamirano, L. J., & Miyake, A. (2015). Toward a comprehensive understanding of executive cognitive function in implicit racial bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(2), 187.
Kawakami, K., Amodio, D. M., & Hugenberg, K. (2017). Intergroup perception and cognition: An integrative framework for understanding the causes and consequences of social categorization. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 55(1), 1-80.
Kleider, H. M., Parrott, D. J., & King, T. Z. (2010). Shooting behaviour: How working memory and negative emotionality influence police officer shoot decisions. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24(5), 707-717.
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