Racial Bias Can Lead to People Seeing Weapons That Aren't There, New Study Says

[Nevilledog]

https://www.contrabandcamp.com/p/tell-it-report-racial-bias-can-lead

Columbia University researchers have determined that racial stereotypes can lead people to see weapons in places where they don’t exist.

The brain imaging study, published Sept. 9, states that racial stereotypes “can infiltrate the brain’s visual system,” leading individuals to turn harmless objects into weapons, Medical Xpress reports.

Led by psychology professor Jon Freeman, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging and neural decoding techniques to study participants’ brains. Among two large, racially diverse groups, Freeman’s team found that when they saw photos of Black men’s faces and then were shown graspable objects like wrenches and drills shortly after, their brains processed it as closely resembling a weapon. Participants were also shown photos of white men as a comparison.

"Our findings demonstrate that the stereotypes we hold can alter the brain's visual representation of an object, distorting what we see to fit our biased expectations," Freeman said in a statement published with the study.

Researchers also asked participants to sort images and identify them as weapons or tools. They found a consistent delay in identifying the tools as tools and not weapons when the participants were shown tools after seeing a Black man’s face.

Too often, these false perceptions have cost Black people their lives or freedom. Andre Hill was holding his phone and keys when police killed him in 2020, believing he was holding a silver revolver. In 2020, Donnie Sanders was killed by a Kansas City police officer, who mistook Sanders’ cell phone for a gun. In 2018, Sacramento police killed Stephon Clark after mistaking his cell phone for a gun.

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