Seeing Race 97The hypothesis is that problematic police force occurs as a
consequence of distorted perception. The assumption of the authors, as
well as those periodicals that have reported on this study, is that normal
perceptions result in normal uses of police force, but distorted perceptions
result in unnecessary use of police force. Notice what happens if we were
to reverse the standard: What if the perception of young black males was
the standard, undistorted perception? The assumption would be that police
officers normally overestimate the formidability of the suspect they are
pursuing, except in those cases where the suspect is misperceived as being
smaller than s/he actually is. The conclusion would be that fewer police
should carry guns, clubs, and tasers, and that they would need to be trained
to be less combative.
This would also mean that young white men are perceived as less
formidable and threatening than they actually are, and that police would be
encouraged to increase the force and suspicion directed towards them (and
white persons in general).
While the authors have made important waves in the discussion about
implicit racial discrimination in the general US public, it has still fallen
short of CRP.
A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF AN INTRODUCTORY
PSYCHOLOGY TEXT: RICHARD GRIGGS’S
“SENSATION AND PERCEPTION” CHAPTER
The previous examination of the study on race-based biases in
perceptual judgment suggests that an orthodox psychology of perception is
ill-equipped to critically handle matters of race and racism. But that could
very well be an isolated phenomenon. In this final section, I will evaluate a
chapter on human perception that has recently been published in an
orthodox introduction to psychology textbook—Psychology: A Concise
Introduction, 5th Edition (Griggs, 2017).