Is the evidence from racial bias shooting task studies a smoking gun? Results from a meta-analysis

The longstanding issue of extrajudicial police shootings of racial and ethnic minority members has received unprecedented interest from the general public in the past year. To better understand this issue, researchers have examined racial shooter biases in the laboratory for more than a decade; however, shooter biases have been operationalized in multiple ways in previous studies with mixed results within and across measures. We meta-analyzed 42 studies, investigating five operationalizations of shooter biases (reaction time with/without a gun, false alarms, shooting sensitivity, and shooting threshold) and relevant moderators (e.g., racial prejudice, state level gun laws). Our results indicated that relative to White targets, participants were quicker to shoot armed Black targets (dav = −.13, 95% CI [−.19, −.06]), slower to not shoot unarmed Black targets (dav = .11, 95% CI [.05, .18), and more likely to have a liberal shooting threshold for Black targets (dav = −.19, 95% CI [−.37, −.01]). In addition, we found that in states with permissive (vs. restrictive) gun laws, the false alarm rate for shooting Black targets was higher and the shooting threshold for shooting Black targets was lower than for White targets. These results help provide critical insight into the psychology of race-based shooter decisions, which may have practical implications for intervention (e.g., training police officers) and prevention of the loss of life of racial and ethnic minorities.