92 Patrick M. Whitehead
As indicated in the title of their article, Wilson et al. found that when
controlling for additional factors,
people perceive young Black men as taller, heavier, more muscular, more
physically formidable and more capable of physical harm than young
White men of the same actual size; and that this bias in physical size
perception can influence the decision to use force against them. (p. 60)The authors generate this set of results by independently testing
participant-perceptions of height and weight based on race, testing
participant-perceptions of muscularity based on race, testing participant-
perceptions of formidability based on race, and finally testing participant-
perceptions of threat based on perceived formidability and the perceived
likelihood of the need to use force. This demonstrates a series of
interactions beginning with the independent variable of perception of race
and ending with the dependent variable of the likelihood to use force.
The impact of their article can be seen in the public’s response to it.
The American Psychological Association (2017) published a press release
about it titled “People See Black Men as Larger, More Threatening Than
Same-Sized White Men.” In the next two days, articles were published in
The Washington Post and the Canadian Broadcasting Channel.
The sensational response it received was because Wilson, et al.
captured a new misperception. Throughout history, the psychology of
perception has nearly always been the psychology of misperception. In
1860, Gustav Theodor Fechner was trying to understand how a subject can
differentiate between loud and soft sounds, but cannot determine a sound
as exactly twice as loud as another. Instruments that objectively measure
length, decibel, and intensity can be used to compare subjective measures
of length, loudness, and brightness. The famous Müller-Lyer illusion
(1889) demonstrates how, for example, an arbitrary contextual detail can
change subjective perceptions of length. Now Wilson, et al. have
discovered a new common misperception. However, instead of being
understood as an optical or auditory illusion, which refer to mistakes in
vision and hearing, the new misperception is not something that can be