ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to demonstrate that racial biases in responses to criminal suspects, although present among some police officers, are not inevitable and can be overcome with training on a computer simulation in which race is nondiagnostic. Studying social behavior is not always an easy task, especially if one is interested in the benefits of a laboratory setting. Tragic events, such as the shooting of Marquise Hudspeth by police officers who mistook the cellular phone that the young Black man was carrying for a weapon, have led people to question whether officers’ split-second decisions to shoot may be influenced by the suspects’ race. Permission to recruit officers was initially obtained through the chiefs of police of the police departments. In evaluating responses to the program, it is useful to consider signal detection theory.
