Fight or flight: The role of context on biased intergroup shooting behaviors.

Work using the First-Person Shooter task (FPST, also referred to as the "Police Officers Dilemma") shows that cultural stereotypes play an integral role in influencing decisions to engage in shooting behaviors during a mock shooter simulation. Knowledge of the Black-violent stereotype typically leads White participants to have a quicker response to "shoot" armed Black target and falsely shoot unarmed Black targets, compared with White targets. Because this task constrains response options to shoot or not shoot, it is unclear what role structural and environmental factors may play in modulating biased shooting behaviors. In this study, participants played a variation of the FPST in which they made speeded shoot/flee decisions in response to armed and unarmed targets. In this variation, participants could "flee" in half of the trials regardless of whether the target was armed. Additionally, participants were primed with instructions that mirrored Stand Your Ground (SYG) law, traditional self-defense laws, or a set of control instructions. Across three studies, participants displayed racially biased behavior only on trials in which they were not allowed to flee from armed targets. In Study 3, EEG was recorded during the task to assess activation of an inhibitory brain network, which differentiated between Black and White targets. Decreased activation of this inhibitory network was associated with increased racial biased behavioral responses for those in the SYG condition. These studies highlight the ability for structural and environmental factors to exacerbate race-based disparities in the use of aggressive force as they pertain to the FPST. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Associations of regional racial attitudes with chronic illness in the United States.

RATIONALE: A growing body of literature has identified a robust relationship between the experience of racial discrimination and negative self-reported physical and mental health outcomes. OBJECTIVE: The current study seeks to identify which factors -at the community level- predict racial disparities in actual disease manifestation. This study focuses on the extent to which regional demographics and racial attitudes, both implicit and explicit, are associated with prevalence rates of several diseases for Black and White patients in the United States. METHODS: Implicit and explicit racial attitudes obtained from Project Implicit (Xu et al., 2017) were aggregated at the county level to predict variation in the prevalence rates of several chronic illnesses among Medicare recipients. RESULTS: When controlling for economic indicators, Black and White patients who live in areas with high implicit and explicit racial bias tend to exhibit a higher incidence of chronic health problems, including cancer, stroke, asthma, diabetes, and heart failure. These relationships tended to be stronger for Black patients. Additionally, patients in racially diverse and racially segregated regions also tended to exhibit a higher incidence of chronic health problems. CONCLUSION: Findings from the study highlight the reliable relationship between both racial biases and regional demographics and the incidence rates of several chronic diseases, particularly in Black patients.

Evaluating the heat-aggression hypothesis: The role of temporal and social factors in predicting baseball related aggression.

We examined the role that season progression and social threats play in the heat-aggression hypothesis within Major League Baseball put forward by Reifman, Larrick, and Fein (1991). Box score data from 38,870 Major League Baseball games between the years of 2000 and 2015 was used to test the heat-aggression relationship, while accounting for temporal and social factors that may be simultaneously exerting influence on player behavior. Controlling for a number of other variables, we observed that the effect of temperature on aggressive behavior is partially contingent on the point of the season in which the game took place. Aggressive behavior was also more likely to occur when teams played divisional (compared to league and inter-league) rivals, however this relationship was contingent on season progression. We provide potential boundary conditions relating to the heat-aggression relationship, indicating this may not be a ubiquitous phenomenon.