The Hindu Business Line : Decision-making in dire situations can be dicey

A FEW cops shoot a brigand, and the next day we all wake up to live safely ever after. But there are some who are busy counting the bullets, and apparently doing the wrong things in the name of `rights' of the `wronged'.

While this forensic post-mortem may mostly be academic, there is an interesting research paper on `making snap judgments' that Vijay Kumar may like to read. Written by a University of Chicago professor, Bernd Wittenbrink, along with a trio from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the paper, originally published in a 2002 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, finds mention in the latest issue of Capital Ideas as also a recent alert from www.economist.com. Roll back, therefore, to February 1999, when four plain-clothes cops were searching a New York neighbourhood for a rape suspect.

When cops saw one Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old West African immigrant, standing at his doorway, they ordered him not to move. As destiny would have it, Diallo reached into his pants pocket.

"Believing he was reaching for a gun, the officers fired a total of 41 shots, 19 of which hit and killed Diallo, who turned out to be unarmed."

With this real story begins the research work titled, "The Police Officer's Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals," to study `the automatic nature of cultural stereotypes.' Cop and thief are stereotypes, as much as Democrat and Republican, taxman and assessee, boss and staff. Cultural stereotypes can influence perceptions, judgments, and behaviour, even if these fixations are not backed by personal beliefs, argue the authors, using the results of a simple videogame.

As the `abstract' explains, "African American or White targets, holding guns or other objects, appeared in complex backgrounds."

Volunteers, including a group of `active-duty police officers', who took part in one of the experiments were told to `shoot' armed targets and to `not shoot' unarmed targets carrying innocuous objects such as cell phone or camera; thus, the game simulated "the situation of a police officer who is confronted with an ambiguous, but potentially hostile, target."

The researchers' idea was to see how far a target's ethnicity impacted the player's decisions to shoot the target. Sadly, they found that "target's ethnicity does indeed affect the decision to shoot." Thus, there were more incorrect decisions "to shoot an unarmed target when he was African-American than when he was white". As if to match, there were failures to respond with a `shoot' decision "when the armed target was white than when he was African-American."

Effects of target ethnicity did not disappear even when the volunteers were offered incentives to make accurate decisions, observes the paper.

Much of our response is `unconscious'; and `stereotypic descriptions' are as common a component of our social life as we quickly identify objects such as chair and car "based on available cues," reason the researchers. Our brain's behaviour in this manner "is perpetuated by the news media, in advertising, or through other cultural influences," notes Capital Ideas.

While rapid recognition and image processing can be useful, the same become `dysfunctional' when the automatic response fails to get consciously overruled using objective input.

Wittenbrink would caution that you might not even be aware that `cultural stereotypes' have the power to inadvertently occur in situations such as "job interviews, meetings with clients, or interactions with colleagues."

That may perhaps explain why we may not get answers to questions such as whether it was possible to have caught a thug alive, or why the boss is delaying your promotion.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in