Mental control and visual illusions: Toward explaining race-biased weapon misidentifications

People are biased to misidentify harmless objects as weapons when the objects are associated with African Americans (Payne, 2001). Two studies examined the processes underlying this bias. The illusory perception hypothesis argues that stereotypes alter the subjective construal of the object. In contrast, the executive failure hypothesis argues that even when perception of the item is intact, misidentifications can result from failures to control responses. Immediately after making an error, participants were able to accurately express that they had made a mistake via confidence ratings (Experiment 1) and by correcting their judgment (Experiment 2). Subjective confidence judgments were extremely well calibrated to accuracy, and participants virtually never believed their own mistakes. Conditions likely to create errors through both illusions and control failures are discussed.