MATLAB's Psychtoolbox Implementation of the shooter task. The shooter task is a famous socialpsychological behavioral test for measuring implicit racial bias (Correll et al., 2002; Essien et al., 2017).
The shooter bias is a phenomenon observed in social psychology research that refers to the tendency for individuals to exhibit a bias in their decision-making and response times when faced with potentially threatening situations (Correll et al., 2002). Specifically, the shooter bias investigates people's implicit racial or ethnic stereotypes, since many people underreport racial or ethinc biases in survey studies.
In the shooter bias task, participants are typically presented with images or videos of individuals holding objects, some of which are weapons (e.g., guns) and others are harmless objects. The participants are instructed to quickly decide whether to shoot or not shoot the person depicted in the image based on their perception of threat.
The concept of shooter bias measures the differential response times and shooting decisions made by participants based on the race or ethnicity of the target individual. Research has shown that participants often exhibit faster reaction times and a higher likelihood of shooting when the target is from a racial or ethnic group stereotypically associated with violence or criminality.
In this replication of the experiment of Essien et al. (2017), participants perform the shooter task (Correll et al., 2002) with unarmed and armed White and Arab-Muslim targets. The design of the experiment is a 2 x 2 design with repeated measures, with the factors "Target Ethnicity" (White vs. Arab-Muslim) and "Object Type" (gun vs. object). The measurement is repeated 20 times with the same background. The stimuli used in the experiment consist of 80 picture pairs, including background images and background images with a person. The stimulis are unfortunately under copyright and can't be shared here.
In the test part of the experiment, 4 stimuli from the original study were used.
The performance part of the experiment consisted of 80 stimuli.
The original study proposed the following hypotheses:
- Participants' reaction times are expected to be faster for armed Arab-Muslim targets compared to armed White targets.
- Participants' reaction times are expected to be slower for unarmed Arab-Muslim targets compared to unarmed White targets.
- Participants show more liberal response biases (i.e., shooting thresholds) for Arab-Muslim targets compared to White targets.
Correll, J., Park, B., Judd, C. M., & Wittenbrink, B. (2002). The police officer's dilemma: using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 83(6), 1314. Essien, I., Stelter, M., Kalbe, F., Koehler, A., Mangels, J., & Meliß, S. (2017). The shooter bias: Replicating the classic effect and introducing a novel paradigm. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 41-47.