Implicit Stereotypes

Police protect the people at all costs, but what happens when the people can’t trust them due to psychological drivers? A big issue with cops right now is implicit bias can affect their decision making in stressful situations. Implicit bias is a belief formed by a society, created unconsciously through everyday experiences, which can result in stereotypes from generalizing. It comes from our brain’s ability to make sense of the world through grouping. Implicit bias is hard to avoid. Subliminal stimuli from anything from television shows, to advertisements can add to the implicit bias, without the person ever noticing it, since it’s all subconscious. Priming can also play a role in implicit bias. Seeing something might result in associating it to the stereotype formed by implicit bias, further …show more content…
Top-down processing is a high level mental process where perceptions are formed through info gained by expectations as well as experiences (Myers, 2014). The expectations of being threatening cause the officer to perceive the unarmed Black man as threatening, even if he wasn’t. If it were possible for cops to exclusively use bottom-up processing, then the cops would process the reaction to an unarmed Black man using only their sensor receptors, and would therefore only see him as an unarmed Black man, and nothing more. Emotions and motivation can top-down influence perceptions. Angry people are more likely to perceive objects as guns, so in the case of the unarmed Black man, if a cop is angry and the man has something in his hand, the cop is more likely to think it is a gun and feel threatened by the Black man (Myers, 2014). Motivation can also play a role if the cop is racist and sees the unarmed Black man, he could feel more threated just because of the man’s skin color. Racist police officers are not good, but unfortunately there’s nothing stopping them from being