Current Research Projects
The Civilian's Dilemma: The Antecedents and Outcomes of the Police-Threat Association
Over two decades of research in social psychology examines the implications of threat processes for police officers' decisions to use lethal force. Yet very little work focuses on civilians' threat processing of the police, despite the fact that police-civilian interactions incur the possibility of danger for both parties. Towards addressing this gap, this line of research focuses on civilians’ automatic threat evaluations of the police, factors that promote these attitudes, and their implications for explicit perceptions of and defensive responses toward the police.
Automatic Defensive Responses to Police
Faced with threats to physical harm, humans exhibit a cascade of automatic bodily and behavioral responses tailored to minimize harm. Responses to threat include initial physiological preparations, followed by defensive flight, freeze, and aggressive behaviors. A police-threat association implies the possibility that civilians evince automatic defensive responses upon encountering police. I recently tested this idea in three studies:
1. Civilians exhibit speeded avoidance of police
One way psychologists measure defensive flight (or avoidance) is using joystick approach-avoidance tasks (AATs). In AATs, participants are instructed to rapidly "approach" or "avoid" certain classes of stimuli based on peripheral features (such as cropped shape) by pushing or pulling a joystick. The content of cropped or bordered images are task irrelevant, yet nonetheless indirectly influence approach and/or avoidance latency. For example, people typically exhibit speeded avoidance to stimuli with embedded threat images such as snakes or spiders. Using an AAT, we found that people show speeded avoidance to police compared to non-police (firefighters, EMTs, casually dressed civilians).
2. Civilians exhibit enhanced freeze responses to police
Human defensive freeze responses are typically measured by assessing whole-body postural sway. People "freeze"-- or exhibit diminished shifts in center-of-pressure (sway) across time -- when viewing threats compared to non-threats. In our work, we find that people freeze to police compared to non-police. To the left is a graph depicting mean differences in variability of forward-back sway to police compared to non-police. Below are two graphs depicting sway to police and non-police across 90 second blocked stimulus presentations (left is a single representative participant, right is the grand mean).
3. Civilians exhibit larger defensive physiological responses to police
Changes in peripheral physiology are integral in the human threat response. A widely studied defensive physiological response is the potentiation of the startle eye-blink reflex. The startle eye-blink reflex is adapted to protect the eyes during audio or tactile startle. Under perceived threat, the magnitude of the startle eye-blink is enhanced (people blink harder), which reflects a muscular (physiological) preparation to respond defensively. Using facial electromyography to measure the magnitude of an audio induced startle eye-blink, we find police relative to non-police images to produce potentiated blinks. That is, civilians exhibit an enhanced physiological preparation to respond defensively to police compared to non-police.
Implications for Explicit Attitudes, Trust, and Police Contact
Our earliest research on automatic attitudes toward the police focused on teasing apart the implications of police-danger and police-negative associations for explicit perceptions of the police. The idea is that people might form summary views of the police as a function of evaluating them as sources of danger or associating them with various other forms of negativity (such as sources of racial bias or threats to freedom). In two studies we simultaneously operationalized police-danger and police-negative associations using three separate affect misattribution procedures (AMPs; an indirect measure of associations) we consistently found police-danger evaluations to predict explicit perceptions ("POPS" scores) of the police over-above police-negative associations. We replicated this pattern in a more recent study and found police-danger associations to also predict less trust in the police and less intentions to contact the police when in personal danger.
Automatic Police-Danger Associations (AMP Scores)
Witnessing Police Violence Strengthens the Police-Threat Association
The advent of body worn cameras and ubiquity of digital and social media have made it easier than ever to witness police violence firsthand. Our most recent project on police-threat associations sought to understand if and how witnessing violent policing affects the police-threat association. We measured baseline police-threat associations using an AMP, before having participants watch and rate videos of (a) high violent or (b) low violent arrests on officer and civilian aggression, fearfulness, and defensiveness. Then participants completed a followup police-threat AMP. Controlling for baseline AMP scores, watching violent compared to nonviolent arrests increased the police-threat association. This effect was fully mediated by perceptions of officer aggression.
Threat and Political Attitudes
Physical Threat Sensitivity and Aggressive Political Attitudes
Much has been made of the idea that physical threat permeates the political mind. Early work found that political conservatism is associated with a heightened sensitivity to threat, yet recent findings have cast doubt on this association. In one line of work, we explore the idea that physical threat promotes similar attitudes across the ideological spectrum. We focus on “aggressive political attitudes” (AGAs) in the form of partisans’ support for violent and antidemocratic tactics to achieve ingroup political power, and theorize that AGAs are instantiations of defensive aggression motivated by physical threat. In an initial study (n = 1,867) we established that, across the political spectrum, physical threat sensitivity underlies support for AGAs. A second study (n = 457) clarifies that the associations between threat sensitivity and AGAs are mediated by perceptions of outparty members as sources of physical threat. In a final study (n = 985), we experimentally reduced perceptions of outparty physical threat, which in turn ameliorated AGAs. Together, our findings imply that physical threat motivates aggressive political sentiments among liberals and conservatives alike.
Support for Partisan Violence
Threat Sensitivity
Anti-Democratic Attitudes
Threat Sensitivity
Human Threat Projection and Political Conservatism
Noted above, early research on threat and political ideology purported to show an association between heightened threat sensitivity and stronger political conservatism. Yet, again, recent replication failures have cast doubt on this finding. In this line of work, we take on the perspective that conservatism may be related to sensitivity to some but not all sources of physical threat. Whereas we find in the above described work that a generalized threat sensitivity is associated with aggressive political sentiments across the political spectrum, this line of work focuses on the the association between political ideology and a specified threat sensitivity.
We find that stronger conservatism is indeed associated with a heightened sensitivity to physical threat, but only when the source of danger originates from humans. In a first study, conservatives reported heightened threat perception of ambiguous human stimuli in the form of point light walkers (PLWs; see first plot to the left). In Study 2, conservatism was associated with perceived likelihood of experiencing physical harm in contexts involving human sources of threat (e.g., encountering a stranger, walking down a dark alley), but not in contexts involving nonhuman sources of threat (e.g., swimming in the ocean, walking in the woods). A final study found that conservatism was associated with stronger postural avoidance to unambiguously threatening human (images of people pointing guns at the viewer), but not nonhuman (images of snarling animal predators) stimuli (see second plot to the left)
Political Ideology (z-scored)
Threat Perception of PLWs
Political Ideology
Postural Avoidance of Human Threats
S1: PLW
S3: Human Threat
