New research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science explored empathy toward Black victims of police violence among a sample of Black Americans. Two studies found that observers who scored low in a measure of racial identity reported less empathy toward victims who had stereotypical Black traits.
Violent acts from White police officers toward unarmed Black men and women have incited massive media attention and public uproar. While the topic of police racial bias has been widely explored in psychology research, the public’s response to actual instances of police brutality toward Black victims has been less explored.
The researchers were particularly interested in exploring these responses among Black Americans.
“My colleague James Johnson and I have been working for more than six years in this specific area of research and both James Johnson and John Dovidio have worked their entire careers (spanning decades) examining racial bias,” said study author Len Lecci, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
“In 2014, we began to investigate some of the psychological mechanisms that may help explain the growing number of incidents in which unarmed Black men are the victims of police violence. We actually tried to create a scenario that we thought would be difficult to justify the aggressive actions of the police, but it turns out that was more challenging than we thought.”
The researchers explored how the interplay between a Black observer’s identification with Black culture and a victim’s demonstration of Black stereotypes would influence the observer’s feelings of empathy for the victim.
An initial study involved 140 Black U.S. residents between the ages of 19 and 72 who were split into two groups. All participants were shown an article, written based on actual events, that described a White police officer firing three times at an unarmed Black man.
“The fictional scenario involves a policeman pulling over a Black motorist for going 3 mph over the speed limit. Then approaching the car with his gun drawn, asking the driver to raise his hands, then after asking for the driver’s license, shooting him 3 times in the chest when the driver reaches for his license in the glove box,” Lecci explained.
One group of participants was shown an image of the victim wearing a hoodie, accompanied by a character description that included stereotypes typically attributed to Black Americans (e.g., plays basketball). For the second group, the victim was pictured wearing a shirt and tie and given a description that included characteristics counter to Black stereotypes (e.g., likes modern opera).
All participants then completed a series of items used to measure racial identity (e.g., “The racial/ethnic group I belong to is an important reflection of who I am”) and a second series of items measuring their empathy for the victim.
According to the results, participants who scored higher in racial identification showed more empathy toward the victim. Moreover, these participants showed heightened empathy toward the victim regardless of whether or not he was described with stereotypical attributes.
Participants who were low in racial identification, however, reported less empathy toward the Black victim when he was described with stereotypical attributes rather than attributes that did not fit Black stereotypes. A second study, conducted among a larger sample of 267 Black Americans, replicated these results.
“Empathy for a Black male victim of White police violence appears to vary as a function of the victim’s stereotypicality (stereotypic/counterstereotypic) and the extent to which the Black participant identifies with his own race (racial identity),” Lecci told PsyPost.
“When racial identity is high, there is generally more empathy for the victim. If racial identity is low, then there was less empathy for the stereotypical victim. These psychological variables may help explain why people react differently to the shootings of unarmed Black men (i.e., there are characteristics of both the victim and the observer/public that predict the response.”
The researchers discuss the troubling implications of their findings, given that the event described to participants involved an unquestionable example of excessive force by a police officer, who fired three times at an unarmed Black man for reaching toward his glove compartment.
“The central and most provocative finding of the current study was that, even under such circumstances, low identified Blacks reported empathic dampening (with greater dehumanization, less valuing, and less positive feelings . . . toward the prototypical (i.e., stereotypical) victim. This is especially concerning given that stereotypical Blacks are those most likely to be the victims of inappropriate police behavior such as unjustified shootings (see Kahn & Davies, 2011),” Johnson and associates relate.
The experiment did offer insight into one factor that might influence the impact of a Black victim’s stereotypicality on others’ responses of empathy. The findings suggest that the negative consequences of stereotypicality are only apparent when it comes to observers who report “minimal psychological connection to their Blackness.”
“I think it’s noteworthy that despite the benign behavior of the Black victim, people don’t uniformly express empathy for him. Tragically, when we created the scenario it was just before a very similar real-world event occurred in Minnesota (the 2016 shooting of Philando Castile),” Lecci said.
The study, “Black Intragroup Empathic Responding to Police Interracial Violence: Effects of Victim Stereotypicality and Blacks’ Racial Identification”, was authored by James D. Johnson, Len Lecci, and John Dovidio.
