Civile Ciro, Obhi Sukhvinder S
Social Brain, Body and Action Lab, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behavior, McMaster University Hamilton, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2017 Feb 6;8:62. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00062. eCollection 2017.
Police provide an essential public service and they often operate in difficult circumstances, requiring high-speed cognition. Recent incidents involving apparent profiling and aggressive behavior have led to accusations that the police are sometimes biased. Given that previous research has shown a link between clothing and cognition, we investigated the question of whether the police uniform itself might induce a bias in social attention. To address this question, and using a Canadian university student sample, we assessed whether wearing a police uniform biases attention toward black faces compared to white faces, and low-status individuals compared to high-status individuals. In Experiment 1 ( = 28), participants wore either a police-style uniform or mechanic overalls, and performed a shape categorization task in the presence of a distractor that could be either: a black face, a white face, a person wearing a hoodie (whom we propose will be associated with low SES), or a person wearing a suit (whom we propose will be associated with high SES). Participants wearing the police-style uniform exhibited biased attention, indexed by slower reaction times (RTs), in the presence of low-SES images. In Experiment 2 ( = 28), we confirmed this bias using a modified Dot-Probe task - an alternate measure of attentional bias in which we observed faster RTs to a dot probe that was spatially aligned with a low SES image. Experiment 3 ( = 56) demonstrated that attentional bias toward low-SES targets appears only when participants the police-style uniform, and not when they are simply exposed to it - by having it placed on the desk in front of them. Our results demonstrate that wearing a police-style uniform biases attention toward low-SES targets. Thus, wearing a police-style uniform may induce a kind of "status-profiling" in which individuals from low-status groups become salient and capture attention. We note that our results are limited to university students and that it will be important to extend them to members of the community and law-enforcement officers. We discuss how uniforms might exert their effects on cognition by virtue of the power and cultural associations they evoke in the wearer.
警察提供着至关重要的公共服务，他们常常在艰难的环境中开展工作，这需要快速认知。近期涉及明显的 profiling 和攻击性行为的事件引发了人们的指责，称警察有时存在偏见。鉴于先前的研究表明服装与认知之间存在联系，我们调查了警察制服本身是否可能在社会注意力方面引发偏见这一问题。为解决此问题，并以加拿大大学生为样本，我们评估了穿着警察制服相比于白色面孔，是否会使注意力偏向黑色面孔；相比于高地位个体，是否会使注意力偏向低地位个体。在实验 1（n = 28）中，参与者要么穿着警察样式的制服，要么穿着机械工工作服，并在存在干扰物的情况下执行形状分类任务，干扰物可以是：一张黑色面孔、一张白色面孔、一个穿着连帽衫的人（我们认为其会与低社会经济地位相关联），或者一个穿着西装的人（我们认为其会与高社会经济地位相关联）。穿着警察样式制服的参与者在低社会经济地位图像出现时表现出注意力偏差，以较慢的反应时间（RTs）为指标。在实验 2（n = 28）中，我们使用改良的点探测任务证实了这种偏差——这是一种注意力偏差的替代测量方法，在此任务中，我们观察到对与低社会经济地位图像在空间上对齐的点探测的反应时间更快。实验 3（n = 56）表明，只有当参与者穿着警察样式的制服时，才会出现对低社会经济地位目标的注意力偏差，而当制服只是简单地放在他们面前的桌子上让他们接触时则不会出现。我们的结果表明，穿着警察样式的制服会使注意力偏向低社会经济地位目标。因此，穿着警察样式的制服可能会引发一种“地位 profiling”，即来自低地位群体的个体变得突出并吸引注意力。我们注意到我们的结果仅限于大学生，将其扩展到社区成员和执法人员很重要。我们讨论了制服如何凭借它们在穿着者身上唤起的权力和文化关联对认知产生影响。
