The whole country is watching Ferguson, MO, where an unarmed African American teenager was shot by a white police officer, leading to violent protests and civil unrest. While Michael Brown’s case is one of the most recent to grab national attention, it was preceded by several other publicized cases involved unarmed African American men mistakenly shot by police officers (e. g., Timothy Thomas, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and Omar Edwards) or by a neighborhood watch volunteer (e.g., Trayvon Martin).

Many question why Officer Wilson did not simply taser or use other less-than-lethal methods on Brown. Social psychology has attempted to answer why such tragic outcomes occur. Perhaps the reasons behind the shooting are not rooted as much in blatant racial bigotry on the part of the officer, but rather in more subtle (but nonetheless quite dangerous) implicit racial biases.

These biases are measured by tasks such as the Weapons Identification Task by Keith Payne (Payne, 2001). In this task, individuals were shown on computer screens images of either an African American or a European American face, then asked to classify a target object (a gun or a tool) as either a weapon or a non-weapon. Studies repeatedly find that participants tend to identify tools as guns when they are preceded by African American faces. These results suggest decisions to shoot unarmed African Americans are driven by associations between guns and African Americans. Police officers are not immune to these biases, as illustrated by Joshua Correll’s work (e.g., Correll et al., 2007). In Brown’s case, the police officer’s decision to shoot might have been driven by activation of certain racial associations in the mere presence of an African American individual. Simply put, implicit associations between African Americans and crime, violence and aggression perhaps contributed to the police officer’s decision to use excessive force and fatally shoot Michael Brown.   

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