Defined By A Name: African-American’s Perceived Prejudices of Law Enforcement Based on the Name of the Detained
David Hackford
University of North Florida
Abstract
Name and consequences of a traffic stop were manipulated in a 2x2 ANOVA to measure its impact on perceived legitimacy of law enforcement. The inference of race from reading a name in a short paragraph was manipulated in conjunction with the driver receiving a ticket or a warning for running a red light. Tyler’s The Legitimacy of Law Enforcement Scale, (1990) was used to measure each manipulation. The subjects used were non-white ethnicity (M= 28.8,SD=10.8)
Keywords Legitimacy, Name, Law, Consequence, African-American
Defined By A Name: African-American’s Perceived Prejudices of Law Enforcement Based on the Name of the Detained
While socially admonished, one of the most prevalent flaws across all humans is prejudice. Nature has made us dependent on simple categorizations. We are bombarded with too many details and too much specific information to retain it all so our brain protects us from this cognitive overload by grouping similar things together. The attempt to lessen cognitive workload often results in mis-categorization of the new information (Allport, 1954). Not only do our brains spontaneously categorize information for us, but the brain also has a tendency to focus on some attributes more than others ignoring details that are just as salient and would allow for much better categorization.
Goldstone’s (1995) study is an exemplar of how the brain poorly categorizes information for us, participants in his experiment were told to make triads of letters and numbers based on their color. He placed letters on the cool side of the color spectrum and numbers on the warm...