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On August 5, 2014, 22-year-old John Crawford was shot and killed by police in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. He had been holding a BB gun picked up in-store and was chatting on the phone to the mother of his two young children.
Three months later on November 22, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot in Cleveland, Ohio the stomach and torso and killed by police after reports he had been waving a gun near a recreation centre. Rice had been playing with an airsoft toy gun in a playground.
Four weeks later, 34-year-old Rumain Brisbon was shot and killed by police in Phoenix, Arizona outside an apartment block. Police had allegedly struggled with him and felt what they thought was a gun in his pocket - it was a bottle of pills.
Their ages and stories are different, but each victim shares one thing in common - at the moment of their violent and untimely deaths, they were unarmed black men going about their everyday lives in the United States.
This all took place in 2014, the same year that 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking nationwide protests and eventually instigating a series of federal civil rights investigations into law enforcement practices. Nevertheless, the problem appears to still be accelerating.
In 2015, 40 per cent of all those unarmed people shot and killed by police were black, despite black men accounting for just six per cent of the US population. Another study suggests black people are twice as likely to be unarmed when killed by police than white people.
And the numbers could be far higher. A new Department of Justice system in the US has been recording killings perpetrated by police at twice the rate officially reported in the past by the FBI - it uses data from open-source resources such as The Guardian’s The Counted campaign, and data from local authorities.
The problem is confounded by a series of exterior factors - a 13-month US Justice Department investigation of the Chicago police force, published January 13, showed that a “pattern” of excessive force, poor training, and a dearth of community policing contributed to a series of civil rights violations. But police were also found to be exhibiting racial bias - the inquiry was instigated following the fatal shooting of 17-year-old black teenager Laquan McDonald.
It’s clear that a prolific racial bias is at play, and needs to be challenged and countered. And a study published today in Nature Communications, might help direct that fight. It shows how our biology can reinforce negative racial biases with deadly consequences. The study found that people were more likely to misidentify a harmless object as a weapon when it was associated with the image of a black man rather than a white man. Significantly, that misidentification was greatest when the image of a black man was displayed at the same time as the viewer’s heartbeat, rather than in between heartbeats. The 32 subjects were ten per cent more likely to mistake a mobile phone for a gun when it was held by a black person during a heartbeat.
The bottom line, say the study's authors - professors of psychology from Royal Holloway London and a neuroscience and psychiatry research fellow from the University of Sussex - is that “activation of race-threat stereotypes synchronised with the cardiovascular cycle”. Fear, based on negative associations of black people and violent crime, made volunteers see weapons when their heartbeats synchronised with the viewing of images. The heartbeat appears to be emphasising those negative biases. It could be extrapolated from the study that a moment of heightened tension - such as a police officer being called to a scene and expecting to see a subject carrying a weapon - will increase heart rate and therefore the chances of mistaking an inanimate object for a serious threat, and ultimately mistakenly perceiving a situation as life-threatening.
“We were motivated by the grim stats from the US where black individuals are twice as likely to be shot and killed by police as white,” co-author on the paper, professor Manos Tsakiris, said during a press briefing. “Social psychologists have long tried to study this effect in lab settings to measure bias. But we lacked a good understanding of the precise mechanism that may underlie this phenomenon.”
“We focused on a very precise communication channel between the heart and the brain - the most important organs of the body - and tried to tap into this physiological mechanism to see how its function may affect the expression of racist behaviour. We wanted to go beyond attitudes, implicit or explicit, they may hold, and focus on the physiology of the body and the brain’s effects on behaviour. We focussed on how the heart sends signals to the brain, and how this particular mechanism influences our cognition to a large extent. The signals are strong enough to change our perceptions - instead of seeing a neutral object for what it is, a neutral object, people were more likely to misperceive it as a weapon, particularly when seeing a black man holding this neutral object.”
Volunteers were shown flashes of pictures of black or white people followed by photos of either a gun or a mobile phone, either in between heartbeats or at the same time as one.
“This is very important. It highlights in a very precise way this mechanism of the way in which physiological signals from the body to the brain influence how we perceive the world and in some cases dominate our perceptions to the extent we misperceive what’s in front of us.”
Co-author Sarah Garfinkel from the University of Sussex has been focusing on these kinds of physiological mechanisms at the lab of professor Hugo Critchley. They looked at how states of bodily arousal “enhance fear and threat processing”.
“We have previously shown if you present a fear stimulus exactly when the heart is beating, there is greater fear stimulus in the brain and people judge this fear stimulus as more threatening. While we have known signals from the heart can interact with the brain, never before has anyone applied it to racial stereotypes. This is something that must be further understood and pursued because of devastating consequences in life.”
The work carried out by Garfinkel and professor Critchley showed that between heartbeats, there is no such signal sent directly to the brain.
“There are also experiments we conducted that indicate those individuals with heightened anxiety have higher interoceptive processes - an embodied mechanism whereby the heart increases stress, anxiety."
To assess the prevalence of the heartbeat impacting racial stereotypes, the team carried out a separate study focused on athleticism. Instead of flashing images of people holding phones and guns, the team showed subjects photos of fruits and sports paraphernalia, immediately after photos of black or white faces. Presentation was timed in between or at the same time as heartbeats. The heartbeat had no significant impact on the subjects’ racial biases here.
This difference is likely explained, again, by the physiological processes at play. Garfinkel explains that every time the heart beats, it activates baroreceptors located near the heart, which serve to sense pressure changes. These send signals to the brain every time they are “pinged”, activating the amygdala - “the part of the brain that deals with fear”. The amygdala is also responsible for forming and storing “associations between somatosensory states and representations of particular stimuli (for example, Black individuals); and mediat[ing] the physiological responses to the associated stimuli,” the Nature Communications paper explains. If interventions are not made, individual's negative racial biases may potentially be confirmed and substantiated by negative portrayals in culture, everyday interactions, or the news, with the amygdala responsible for these biases being repeatedly strengthened. Although the theory has not been tested, “a faster stronger heartbeat, may mean a greater potential to respond to these signals, resulting in more racist stereotype behaviour”.
The research gives important insights into why more and more fatal mistakes are occurring. But the data is also simply reflecting a deep-rooted problem of racism that is clear to many, and has been explicitly stated in the Chicago police report published last week, which warned of civil rights violations. These kinds of reports will be ongoing, a wider part of a push by president Barack Obama to address the nationwide tensions, and the apparently embedded and deadly shortcomings of a nation’s police force.
There are fears however, that president-elect Donald Trump will scale back these kinds of civil rights checks and balances, and the resulting court-enforced police reforms that we are seeing the beginnings of in Chicago. While many across the US have been enraged or entirely despairing at the lack of prosecutions against police in light of public video evidence of apparent wrongdoing, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, has criticised the so-called “war on police” thus: "There is a perception, not altogether unjustified, that this department, the Civil Rights Division, goes beyond fair and balanced treatment but has an agenda that's been a troubling issue for a number of years."
If, however, investigations continue along with the reforms that go with them, the authors behind the Nature Communications paper believe their study can help.
Co-author on the study, Ruben Azevedo of Royal Holloway London, said: “An individual may see someone walking down an alley and have the same fear response, but they must control responses and try to downgrade this. We want to strengthen the control processes, the frontal part of the brain. In our culture we do that through education. One of the main aims is to make us more considerate of others, and make us less biased. Neuroscience, brain stimulation techniques, and other cognitive domains help in changing patterns of behaviour. We need people to try to understand embodied mechanisms and what is important.”
“People may be able to mitigate and downplay the effect,” adds Garfinkel. “We can train people to be more accurate - if they are more aware of their heart beating they can counteract negative and influential effects that these things have on processing.”
“We all know that to a large extent social stereotypes are embedded in our culture - but they also become embodied in our physiology,” says Tsakiris.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
