The Incarcerating Power of Stereotypical Beliefs

Freeman testified at trial that Abrahams was trying to stop him and Willingham from fighting, and that she hit Willingham in the face. Willingham, Freeman testified, then raised his hand as if he was going to hit Abrahams, but then lowered it to his waist, which prompted Freeman to believe he had a gun. Freeman shot Willingham three times, according to police.

-Detroit Free Press June 20, 2019

America is very good at some things and very bad at others.  We produce a steady flow of scientific, cultural, and engineering successes– in the past five years we can lay claim to a drug that cures hepatitis C, Hamilton: The Musical, and self-driving cars.  And yet, we perform just this side of miserable at addressing core social and economic challenges.  We are among the world’s leaders in income inequality, obesity rates, drug overdose deaths, and per capita greenhouse gas emissions.  And, we rank first, that is worst, in the proportion of citizens in jail at about seven people per thousand.  Even more troubling, blacks are six times as likely as whites to be behind bars.

Why is this so?  And what is to be done?  In their exceptional book, Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice, economists Brendan O’ Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi examine our troubled, racist criminal justice system with depth, maturity, pragmatism, and focus.

The book combines thoughtful, balanced analyses of recent events – the shootings of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and Philando Castile – with innovative social science thinking.  The authors methodological range extends from econometric considerations of causality and selection bias to philosophical considerations on the value of integration.  Glenn Loury describes the book as technically impressive and morally serious. Danielle Allen says it should be it required reading for policy makers and citizens alike.   For these reasons and more, this summer professors from Philly to Phoenix restructured their fall course syllabi on criminal justice, race, and social justice with this book as a centerpiece.  But this isn’t just a book for academics.  Anyone involved within the criminal justice system – from front line police officers, to judges, to politicians – would be enlightened by this book.

Any analysis of race and crime must cut through the complexity.  O’Flaherty and Sethi accomplish this by separating out the key crimes:  robbery, murder, larceny, etc…  This restriction enables them to make comprehensible the hairball of data relating race and crime.  That act alone creates an invaluable resource.  They then construct a theoretical framework that reveals the extent to which our behaviors can be traced to stereotypical beliefs.  Stereotypes prompted James Freeman to believe Deandr’e Willingham had a gun.

That belief had lethal consequences. James shot.  Three times. Deandr’e is now dead.  James will spend the next quarter to a half century in jail.

The Willingham shooting, like too many others, resulted from a stereotype driven behavior.  These behaviors impact rates of crime, whether people testify, who police stop and how judges sentence.  And, these actions all interconnect to produce rampant racial bias.  The murder rate is connected to the reluctance to testify which is connected to the fear of retribution much like the shin bone is connected to the ankle bone and the ankle bone connected to the heel bone.  A decision to shoot first depends on a belief that the other person will shoot, on an expected probability of being caught, and on a belief that witnesses will testify.

If stereotypes are the cause, why don’t we just eradicate them? Stereotypes arise, in part, because they must.  They belong to a broader category of cognitive attention biases which arise because we simply cannot pay attention to all of the particulars.  We take shortcuts. We bin people into categories.  We lump to live.  That lumping may be the result of rational calculations – it’s not worth our time to consider every particular (rational inattention bias). It may be that we lack the cognitive capacity (behavioral attention bias) or the time or experience to draw precise inferences (categorical cognition bias).   Regardless of the cause, we could not navigate the world without categorizing reality and therefore stereotyping.

When threatened, our lumping becomes even more crude.  Is a person approaching us on the street a threat to our safety?  It’s a question that we all have asked.  If we could take all of a person’s characteristics into account, we could (in theory) accurately predict if the person poses a threat, and act without bias.    But on the street, we have to act fast, we lack full information, and our emotions hinder our ability to think clearly. Herein lie the seeds of our racial incarceration disparities. In threatening situations, we lack the luxury of thinking through a hundred visions and revisions.   We fall back on stereotypes.  We classify people by their race.  We then construct beliefs based on racial stereotypes, and rely on those beliefs to guide our actions.   We believe he has a gun.  We shoot three times.

The Willingham case is just one example. O’Flaherty and Sethi provide an empirically grounded chapter by chapter account of the behavioral implications of a range of stereotypical beliefs, which they ground in data. Whites are more likely to hand over their wallets but carry less money.   Blacks are more likely to be stopped and searched by police.  Murderers of whites are more likely to be prosecuted.  Black witnesses are less likely to testify, and so on.

Each bias on its own adds to racial disparities along a dimension: arrests, shootings, incarceration rates, etc…  The biases also accumulate because each potential criminal interaction consists of a sequence of belief based actions.  In revealing how linked sequences of racial biased actions accumulate, the authors make an original and important contribution. Each stereotypical belief can ring mostly true, each action can be rational (given beliefs), yet by adding belief upon belief and action upon action, the results can be tragic.

Consider the following two scenarios.  In the first, a homeowner with a registered handgun hears a noise downstairs in the middle of the night.  He grabs his gun and encounters a trespasser.  The homeowner must decide whether or not to shoot.   That choice depends on the homeowner’s beliefs: will the trespasser flee?  Will he turn and shoot? The homeowner faces risks to shooting – the trespasser could be the neighbor’s son who left his iPhone earlier in the evening.

The Castle doctrine, the legal doctrine that a person’s home is his castle, gives the homeowner the legal right to defend it.  This doctrine makes the homeowner more dangerous to a genuine intruder.  Thus, an intruder who believes a homeowner is going to shoot will be more likely to shot first instead of fleeing.  That belief in turn puts the homeowner at greater risk.  A homeowner who believes that a trespasser is not his neighbor’s son, who believes the trespasser is likely to shoot, and who believes he will not be arrested if he shoots the trespasser first, will likely shoot.  It stands to (stereotypical) reason, that if the intruder sees the homeowner reach for anything (a light switch, flashlight, or cellphone), the intruder will fire away.

Using this logic, O’Flaherty and Sethi argue that the Castle doctrine, though intended to make people feel safe,  contributes to higher homicide rates as do stand-your-ground laws which lower the risk of prosecution for those who shoot when they could safely retreat.  The evidence supports them.

In the second scenario, imagine two people involved in a heated argument in a bar who are escorted out to the parking lot.  One of the participants has a gun but he is unaware if his fellow combatant is armed.  The gun holder faces the same choice as the homeowner: shoot or go home.   His action depends on two beliefs:  the odds the other person will shoot and the odds that shooting first will result in prosecution.

Racial stereotypes affect outcomes in this situation as well.  If the combatants are white, the gun holder will believe (correctly) that shooting first will almost surely result in prosecution if the other combatant does not have a gun. Thus, unless he has a strong belief that the other party is armed, he will not shoot.

If, on the other hand, the combatants are black, the gun holder might stereotypically believe, like James Freeman did, that his fellow combatant is armed.   Moreover, if the first person might believe that if he does shoot, he can escape prosecution. That belief would be logical if he believes that onlookers will fail to testify.   That belief can be accurate if people in the neighborhood distrust the criminal justice system.  This concatenation of stereotypical beliefs results in a black gun holder being more likely to shoot a black person than a white gun holder shooting a white person.   The beliefs prove self-reinforcing:  black gun holders who shoot bolster the belief that a black person is more likely to shoot.

What then is to be done? Changing behavior requires changing beliefs.  Ridding ourselves of the worst stereotypes will take time and meaningful interactions across racial groups. Reducing stereotypical thinking becomes easier as society becomes more integrated, as we see experience our common humanity. O’Flaherty and Sethi also advocate better police community relations – more meaningful engagement and less stop-and-frisk. Police behaviors and protocols that increase trust can change beliefs and improve the likelihood of solving homicides with black victims.  That in turn reduces the incentives to commit crimes.

They bravely suggest that people act in ways that guide the beliefs of others. They do not demand that everyone whistle Vivaldi, only that we proceed from positions of trust and kindness and find common ground.  There exists a lot of space between acting white and acting threatening.   We need, as a society, to explore and better understand that space.

They also sign on to some novel policies worth our attention such as allegation escrows, an idea initially proposed by Ian Ayres.  Allegation escrows allow people to provide eyewitness accounts anonymously with the assurance that they will only be called upon if other witnesses also come forward.

As a first step, O’Flaherty and Sethi advocate self-awareness of our stereotypical reasoning and how biases build sequentially from our thigh bones all the way to the bracelet encircling our ankle bones. That’s sound advice.  What a society believes of a person influences that person’s life course. Belief in the goodness of others, like the belief that that another person will shoot, is self-reinforcing.   And, therein lies the hope provided by this outstanding book.

Scott E Page

Stephen M Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

Santa Fe Institute