The Justice and Responsibility League

Racial Profiling and a Misunderstanding of Probability

Key Sun, Ph.D. — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:41:40 +0000

Racial profiling can be broadly defined as a practice in law enforcement based on the belief that a person's category membership (e.g., ethnicity, national origin) functions as an indicator of criminal propensity. In my previous posts on the topic, "why moral education has not reduced racial profiling (1) & (2)," I examined some cognitive root of the biased practice. The current discussion explores another type of cognitive distortions that supports racial profiling-a misunderstanding and misapplication of probability/statistics.

One of the most typical justifications that officers use for racial profiling involves the statement that "it is true that certain ‘groups' are more like to commit offenses or infractions than the others." I think that this statement suggests the confusion about basic probability and statistics concerning criminal behavior. This confusion consists of two cognitive errors:
1) unawareness of the distinction between the relative frequency and the absolute frequency regarding a particular crime-prone attribute, and
2) ignorance about the multiplication rule of probability for criminal behavior. Namely, failure to recognize that criminal behavior is determined by the interaction of multiple variables or factors.

Regarding the first error, research in criminology and psychology has identified numerous variables that may increase an individual tendency to commit crime. These variables range from social disorganization, dysfunctional environments, crime learning conditions, developmental problems, lack of social control, lack of education, stigmatization, cognitive deficiencies, impulsivity, childhood trauma, as well as some associated demographic variables such as gender, social class and race. The distinction between the relative frequency and the absolute frequency can be explained with the following examples:

Research has shown that people with only high school education are more likely to commit crime than people with graduate degrees. The same can be said about high impulsive persons, who are more inclined to commit crime than low impulsive persons. Let's assume that in both cases, the former are 90% and the latter are 10% in criminal propensity. The 90% statistics looks impressive but it is quite misleading. The number only represents the relative frequency of the tendency in comparison. It does not suggest that 90 % of the people who have high school diploma or are impulsive will commit crime, because the absolute frequency (the number of offenders with the attribute out of the total population with the same attribute in the United States) is extremely low, it is certainly below 5% of the total population. Another example may make the distinction more clear. Statistically, more than 80% serial killers are white males, but it does not suggest that being a while male makes the person 80% more likely to become a serial killer, because the absolute frequency is so low.

Additionally, the official crime statistics may be problematic. According to FBI's Uniform crime report (2007) on arrest by race, of all adults and juveniles arrested nationwide in 2007, 69.7 percent were whites, 28.2 percent were blacks, 1.3% were American Indians or Alaska Natives, and 0.8 were Asians or Pacific Islanders. Although the sum is 100%, there is a problem: The arrest data on Hispanic Americans, which are 15% of the U.S. population, are conspicuously missing. Someone may argue that Hispanic populations are not really a different race and their arrest data were distributed among the four groups above (are they really four "different" races)? If it is the case, it only shows the lack of precision in the crime statistics.

The second error involves the ignorance about the multiplication rule of probability for criminal behavior. To understand the rule, we can look at how it is applied to the offender profiling for serial killers. On the basis of analyzing the characteristics of known serial killers in America (e.g., Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Aileen Wuornos, Robert Lee Yates, and many others), researchers have developed a profile for the offenders. The offender characteristics include: White males (80%), above average intelligence, committing the first murder at the age between 24 and 40, 50% married with a stable family life and stable jobs, and a sign of cruelty to animals in childhood, among other factors.

This offender profiling has certain validity in helping law enforcement personnel to detect and investigate serial offenders, because it is based on the understanding of the multiplication rule of probability for criminal behavior. That is, the probability of a suspect as a serial killer is a product of race, gender, intelligence, marital status, childhood deviant behavior, and other factors. In other words, because the variables are independent from one another, an individual attribute alone on the list (e.g., race, intelligence) has no predictive value about the criminal likelihood of the target person. In fact, as shown in criminological research, most criminal behaviors are the product of the interaction of multiple causes and variables, rather than determined by one or two variables.

The application of the multiplication rule to predicting and detecting serial killers has limitations, because not all identified attributes on the profiling list can be generalized to all serial killers. For example, it took about 20 years to catch Gary Ridgway - aka the "Green River Killer," because his name came out early but police initially thought the killer was unmarried while he was married. In addition, important psychological variables about serials killers are not included in the profile.

In short, racial profiling is biased, because:

1) It is based on misunderstanding the scientific theory of probability.

2) It contradicts the mission of the justice system, which has two purposes: First, to punish the guilty, and second, to protect the innocent. Racial profiling has violated the principle of protecting innocent individuals by turning thousands of innocent people across the country into the victims.

3) It creates a self fulfilling prophecy, because when officers only focus on certain categories of individuals (yes, they will catch some criminals among them), they will also bypass many criminals about whom they do not do profiling.

An Overlooked Problem with The New Hate Crimes Bill

Key Sun, Ph.D. — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:57:56 +0000

If someone says that a woman or a child is raped because the victim is a woman or a child, does it sound absurd? It sounds ridiculous because the person explains the crime incidence as caused by the distinctiveness of the victim, but does not blame the offender for the offense. By analogy, a similar problem is associated with the legal definition of hate crime.

Most opponents of the new hate crimes bill (S. 909, Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act) argued that the pending legislation would expand the federal government protections to selected citizens and groups. Although I applaud the intention of the new bill--to provide Federal assistance to States, local jurisdictions, and Indian tribes to prosecute hate crimes and to offer guidelines for handling related issues, I oppose the ambiguous wording of the hate crime definition, because the wording intends to define both what is hate crime and what causes hate crime. It does not do well on either task.

According to the new bill, the term "hate crime" has the same meaning given in Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Namely it refers to crime in which "the defendant intentionally selects a victim, ...because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability or sexual orientation of any person." I think that the phrasing has the following problems:

First, it hinders the effort to identify and accurately classifying bias crimes, including the ambiguity of applying the legal definition to cases (see Cronin, et al., 2007).)

Second, as I described in the early post "Does the victim cause hate crime?" and in a journal article (Sun, 2006), the legal definition of hate crime is a criminal law definition. According to criminal law, the defendant is guilty of a crime only when the offender's criminal commission or omission occurred with a simultaneous mens rea or criminal intent. The "because" statement in the previous hate crime legislation is supposed to define the offender' mental state that includes the required criminal intent (mens rea) and the offender's cognitive distortions (using perceived group differences between the self and the victim to rationalize crime). However, instead of using the sound legal language to describe the required mental state of the offender, the wording in the definition has adopted the popular victim-focused explanation or phrase about "why" the offender commits hate crime. Namely, someone commits prejudice or bias offenses because of the victim's different group membership.

Criminal law only has the caliber to define what is legal or illegal, but it does not have the power (and is not supposed) to offer scientific explanations for crime, including hate crime. This confusion in the definition has created the misperception about the psychological causes of hate crime for the public and the mass media. For example, it is common to read a news article that explains a prejudice-motivated offense as generated by the victim's race, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin, among others. In other words, people tend to use the victims' group memberships or distinctiveness (e.g., race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs) to explain prejudice and related crime, assuming that individuals become the victims of prejudice or hate crime because of their group memberships. Inadvertently, this misattribution puts the blame on the victim, rather than on the offender.

For people looking for psychological explanations for hate crime, research has demonstrated several more plausible causal explanations about the offenders, including:

a) Authoritarian personality (e.g. submissive to authority figures, displace their hostility and self hatred onto lower status targets or outgroup members).

b) Prejudice and cognitive distortions, including erroneous generalization and oversimplification about the targets, the formation of social attitudes before or despite objective evidence and other inaccuracies in categorizing, evaluating, and explaining social entities.

c) Offenders' individual characteristics, including offenders' childhood traumas and harsh treatments (with punitive and abusive parents, etc), and a sense of self vulnerability.

d). Dehumanization of the victim.

e) A tendency to classify people into rigid categories and the belief in the fixed boundary of the categories.

Finally, what is a better definition for hate crime? I think that it can be defined as an intentional, illegal and violent act based on the perpetrator's bias or prejudice against the status of the victim.

References

Cronin, S. W. et al. (2007). Bias-crime reporting: Organizational responses to ambiguity,

uncertainty, and infrequency in eight police departments. American Behavioral Scientist,

51(2), 213-231.

Sun, K. (2006). The legal definition of hate crime and

the hate offender’s distorted cognition.

Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 27, 597-604

Why Some Psychopaths Are in Leadership Positions

Key Sun, Ph.D. — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:47:39 +0000

It is well observed that psychopaths (a.k.a. sociopaths) are found both in prison and in managerial positions. In "The Sociopath Next Door," Martha Stout analyzed many individuals with psychopathy and most of them were not part of the offender population. I think that leadership researchers have somehow overlooked these types of "leaders" or organizational psychopaths who have inflicted pain to many but succeeded in maintaining their positions (even been promoted).

Robert Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R, 2nd ed.) suggests that psychopathy consists of the following traits:
(1) interpersonal or affective defects (e.g., glibness or superficial charm, grandiose feelings of self-worth, conning or manipulative behavior, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affects, callousness or lack of empathy)
(2) social deviance and antisocial (irresponsibility, parasitic lifestyle, impulsivity, and unstable relationships, criminal versatility).
(3) other attributes.
However, this inventory is apparently intended only for the forensic population and not for psychopaths who know how to elude the criminal justice system.

I have only encountered about three or four psychopaths in organizational settings in the past. I observed they were frequently abusive, disregarding the feelings and rights of others; they caused disasters to everything they put their hands on. However, they appeared to never be found responsible for the harms they did. I always wonder how those who are neither emotionally nor socially intelligent (namely, they lack the basic leadership qualifications suggested by some researchers) operate so well, whereas nice people in the same settings are frequently reprimanded or punished.

I have several tentative explanations:
1. Psychopaths know how to ingratiate themselves with people of higher status.
2. They prey on nice victims who they know are unlikely to jeopardize their positions.
3. They know how to take others' achievements as their own credits, and blame their mistakes on others.
4. They are good at using both fear and tear to menace and confuse others.
5... ...

I truly hope that leadership researchers spend more time examining this type of "leader."

My Impression of Philip Zimbardo at 2009 WPA Convention

Key Sun, Ph.D. — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:18:30 +0000

I just returned from the 2009 WPA (Western Psychological Association) Convention in Portland, Oregon, with a plethora of materials to ruminate on. A conference of this magnitude always provides me with a spectrum of lectures, programs, workshops and posters that are so enthralling as to compete for my time, and with an outlet to share my research with colleagues and students. However, what struck me most at the conference is a unique presentation by Philip Zimbardo.

Before hearing the new rousing lecture, I felt that I knew him only from a distance. I read about Stanford Prison Experiment when I studied criminal justice and psychology at a university on the east coast. I talked about his research on deindividuation in my class and showed the video "Discovering Psychology" once in a while. I met one of the participants in the mock prison experiment several years ago and he recently told me that I "must" read Zimbardo's new book "The Lucifer effect: understanding how good people turn evil." I also attended his presentations a couple of times at WPA and APA conventions before. Although I admire his exceptional achievements in psychology and other fields, I object to some of his assertions. For example, he describes acupuncture as a type of "faith healing" in Discovering Psychology (updated edition), overlooking recent empirical research on acupuncture.

Philip Zimbardo's presentation, entitled "My Lifetime Love Affair with Psychology and Public Service," started at 5pm on Sat at this WPA. Phil's reputation as a droll and humorous speaker is legendary. As in similar occasions, the lecture hall was overcrowded with participants who expected a good time. At beginning, he indicated that the presentation was intended mainly for both graduate and undergraduate students. At the end of his talk, however, I think that not only the students, faculty and professionals all had a good time, but also they learned something much deeper. What separates this presentation from the previous ones I attended is his candid reflection on his personal experiences.

He talked about his experience as a five-year-old in a quarantined hospital who tried to read all available books there in the late 1930s. As one of the boys in a large Italian family living in New York, he was frequently a victim of prejudice. He had been called various names and avoided at theater. When he applied for the graduate psychology program at Yale, the department initially thought he was a black student and was hesitated in their decision. Zimbardo did not shun mentioning his mistakes, including his initial indifference to the plight of the participants in the prison experiment when the research entered the sixth day. Thanks to his wife-to-be who ran into his office talking about her distress regarding the experiment, the research was concluded. He also talked about his hope for the younger generation to become "hero."

What I (and many others) learned from the lecture is how an eminent psychologist overcame various adversities and still lives and thinks like an ordinary person.

Four Drawbacks of Cognitive Therapy

Key Sun, Ph.D. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:08:08 +0000

Cognitive therapy is a generic term that refers to diverse cognitive approaches to modifying human experiences and activities. This critique focuses on cognitive therapy that focuses on altering negative self concepts. This approach is based on the theories developed by A. Beck and A. Ellis.

The self-focused cognitive approach assumes that it is irrational or negative cognitive beliefs about the self, rather than negative activating experiences, that lead to negative emotional states (e.g., depression or anxiety) and dysfunctional behavior. The behavior includes a sense of defeat and the withdrawal of investment in people and in conventional goals, as well as an intensified sense of vulnerability. The purpose of cognitive therapy is to restructure the client's irrational/negative/distorted beliefs into rational, accurate or positive ones.

Although the self-focused cognitive therapy has been shown to be superior to medication treatment for the symptoms of depression and anxiety, it also suffers at least the following weaknesses:

First, this model appears to confuse the symptoms (i.e., negative self concepts) of depression with its causes. Examples of the negative cognition include low self-esteem, self-blame and self-criticism, negative predictions, unpleasant memories, erroneous interpretations of experiences, all-or-nothing thinking (dichotomous thinking), jumping to conclusions, selective abstraction, overgeneralization or exaggeration of negative experiences, the presence of a negative cognitive shift (i.e., positive information relevant to the individual is filtered or blocked out, whereas negative self-relevant information is readily admitted). In short, for those individuals, negative cognitions permeate internal conversations about self-evaluation, attributions, expectancies, inferences and recall. Are they the cognitive causes or they are the symptoms?

Second, this cognitive therapy uses such terminology as negative self-concepts, irrational belief about the self, dysfunctional self-concept, and biased cognitions about the self, as if they are synonymous and interchangeable. In fact, they have diverse meanings. Research has shown that the valence of evaluations (e.g., being positive or negative) is independent and separate from the accuracy of evaluations. In many cases, clients' appraisals and reports of their negative or distressful experiences are quite rational, realistic, and accurate. For example, their experiences of sexual or physical abuse at the hands of another or the tragedies of their loved ones have left enormous scars in their life. In such circumstances, cognitive-restructuring exercises, with their emphasis on reframing reality and not on changing it, do not deal with the true problem.

Third, research has shown that positive self-evaluations may be dysfunctional and maladaptive. It is the positive, rather than the negative self-assessment that is characterized by inaccuracy and bias in the fields of health, education and the workplace.

Fourth, the self-focused cognitive model puts a strong emphasis on examining the association between negative thoughts and mental dysfunction, but it has not answered the question of why individuals choose to focus on their negative attributes when the positive evaluation of the self is more accurate. Neither the cognitive model adequately reconciles the two types of finding: (1) self-blame bias and (2) self-serving bias. Research has shown that people have the motivation to see the self positively and avoid a negative self-concept, exhibiting a self-serving bias (including blaming failures on the situation while taking credit for success).

A Different Formula for Creating Happiness

Key Sun, Ph.D. — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:27:12 +0000

In Carlin Flora's "Get Happy" survey last month, the interviewees provided their diverse insightful advices. However, I have a different formula for creating happiness (I hope it is not too late for this year): Doing art works (e.g., paintings, drawing) regularly for self expression, communicating/releasing positive and negative emotions, and/or inspiriting others. I believe this prescription works both for readers and for the culture.

Doing art works does not entail receiving extensive new training in using art materials, it does require we reclaim our innate curiosity about nature and others. We need to restart to focus on and discover beauty in nature and in other people and be less reserved with our creativity.

In terms of the practice's benefit for the society, there is a consensus that reducing violence or the violent aspect of the culture is a priority. Research has demonstrated that offenders who received art therapy services exhibited a marked change in their behavior and attitude, an improvement in their mood, socialization and problem-solving abilities, and greater cooperation with the staff and their peers. I also dare to claim that politicians who create art works regularly are less likely to wage wars than leaders who cannot appreciate and create beauty.

The teaser image "Bamboo" is one of my paintings. I invite you view some of my other paintings in here (under "attachments" of the webpage) to feel happier.

Why Moral Education Has Not Reduced Racial Profiling? (2)

Key Sun, Ph.D. — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:42:28 +0000

In the post "Why moral education...(1)," I argued that we needed to view prejudiced practices (e.g., racial profiling) not as an issue of immorality but as a product and manifestation of cognitive distortions. In general, people's learning experiences are responsible for their cognitive distortions of social reality, which regulate their prejudiced practices. The deficient learning involves both the lack of access to accurate information and frequent exposure to false information. Research has shown that that the media's biased reports and portrayals about minorities in the society play an important role in developing people's cognitive distortions of social reality.

By examining newsmagazines and network television news shows, Gilens (1996) found that news media distortions coincide with public misperceptions about race and poverty. Both are biased in ways that reflect negatively on the poor in general and on poor African-Americans in particular. On the one hand, the media are subject to many of the same biases and misperceptions that afflict American society at large and therefore reproduce those biases in their portrayals of American social conditions. On the other hand, Americans rely heavily on the mass media for information about the society in which they live. The media shapes Americans' social perceptions and political attitudes in important ways. Media distortions of social conditions are therefore likely to result in public misperceptions that reinforce existing biases and stereotypes.

Using data derived primarily from newspaper archives, modern films and documentaries that focus on hate, research monographs of various hate-watch organizations, and secondary documents, Judson and Bertazzoni (2002) showed that the rhetoric of hate in mainstream dialog and the discourse of our political parties, the Internet, the media, and popular movies, have reinforced hate crime, stereotyping, and the atmosphere of intolerance. As cited in their research, only 15% of US drug users are African-American, but 50% of network news stories on drugs focus on African-Americans. Asian, Pacific, American and Latino characters are often the victims of racial humor and stereotypes. American films have a long legacy of stereotyping the "others" which is often the basis for discrimination and hatred.

The study by Dixon and Linz (2002) measured the extent of pre-trial publicity on Los Angeles television news and examined the relationship of the race of the accused compared with the amount of prejudicial information in the newscast. They found that Blacks and Latinos were twice as likely as Whites to be associated with prejudicial statements on local television news. Latinos who victimized Whites were almost three times as likely as White defendants to be associated with prejudicial information. The prejudiced statements that led to biased opinions about the target case include:

1. Prior convictions of the defendant (explicitly stated or implied by reported prison term served);
2. Prior arrests of the defendant;
3. Negative statements about the defendant's character or reputation (e.g., the person seemed deranged, chronic troublemaker);
4. Defendant's confession or admission (a direct quotation by the defendant or a report that the defendant had confessed);
5. Defendant's refusal to make a statement;
6. Defendant's performance on any examination or test (e.g., lie detector, breathalyzer);
7. Defendant's refusal to submit to an examination or test;
8. The possibility of a plea of guilty to the offense charged or a lesser charge (any discussion of potential plea bargains); and
9. Opinions of guilt or of a strong case against the defendant (not defendant admission).

The study by Klein and Naccarato (2003) shows that Blacks and Latinos are portrayed more frequently as criminals than Caucasians in local television news, and minority misrepresentation has been shown to be out of proportion to crime statistics. Whites are overrepresented as homicide victims, compared to crime statistics, whereas Blacks and Latinos are underrepresented as victims. The worst part is that most viewers believe that the real world is similar to the television world.

Asian Americans are not immune from the inaccurate portrait by the media either. For example, when Paul Haggis' movie "Crash" received 3 Oscars in 2006 it was touted as a movie against racism. However, the movie was criticized as "deceptive," "disgusting and biased" and "racist" by Chinese American community, because the movie depicted Los Angeles as a city full of illegal Chinese immigrants when in reality they account for 4 % illegal immigrants in America. When Hollywood produces and promotes deceptions in the name of anti-racism or other "PC" slogans, it creates more harm than when it honestly admits its biases.

In short, prejudiced practices by some personnel in the criminal justice system are psychologically rooted in their cognitive distortions about what is true and false, which determines their judgments of what is right and wrong. In other words, the perception (and misperception) of "what is" leads to the perception (and misperception) of "what ought to be" (moral judgment and practice).

References

Dixon, T. L., & Linz, D. (2002). Television news,
prejudicial pretrial publicity, and the
depiction of race. Journal of Broadcasting &
Electronic Media, 46, 112-136

Gilens, M. (1996). Race and poverty in America: Public
misperceptions and the American news media. Public
Opinion Quarterly, 60, 515-541.

Klein, R. D., & Naccarato, S. (2003). Broadcast news
portrayal of minorities. American
Behavioral Scientist, 46, 1611-1616.

Judson, J. L., & Bertazzoni, D. M. (2002). Law, media,
and culture: The landscape of hate. New York: Peter
Lang.

Notes from The Underground: An inmate’s effort to learn Taoist Wisdom

Key Sun, Ph.D. — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:58:31 +0000

A week before the Thanksgiving, a letter reached my office from an inmate serving time in a midwest state prison. It has been some time since I did counseling and interventions with correctional offenders, no wonder I was surprised. The inmate is not one of my previous clients. I only knew from the letter that he was an offender with a Hispanic family name. He said that he wrote to me because he had read my article "How to overcome without fighting: An introduction to the Taoist approach to conflict resolution," and he learned a lot. I was glad to hear his comments because the article, drawn wisdom from the Ancient Chinese texts of both Tao Te Ching (by Lao Tzu) and the Art of War (by Sun Tzu), elucidates how to deal with interpersonal conflict in a peaceful and constructive way.

I checked the prison website according to his mailing address. The website described the facility as having the mission to protect the public by detaining adult male felons and preparing them for custody reduction and eventual reintegration into society. In the letter, he also asked me to mail him some Taoist literature so that he could study it, including "The Art of War" printed on papers because inmates are not allowed to own books there. Convinced that he would benefit from reading Sun Tzu's axiom, "To win without fighting is the best strategy" and Lao Tzu's wisdom against all types of violence, I searched the internet and printed out the two texts.

I mailed him the package several days before the Thanksgiving. I received his response two days ago. He said that he was very upset because he was denied the materials I mailed to him. I wonder why he could not have the texts that teach people how to create and maintain interpersonal harmony and mental peace.

Talking on the phone with the mailroom manager in the correctional facility, I was told that "The Art of War" is one of many books in the State DOC system that inmates are prohibited to read or have. He was not kidding. Although Sun Tzu wrote the book 2,500 years ago, some people believe its contents are unsuitable for offenders. Maybe people who developed the policy and the list of banned books never read the book but they were alerted by the word "war" in the title.

Certainly many individuals may use "The Art of War" for their personal benefits. In the movie "Wall Street," Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen, who played a corporate raider and a young stockbroker, respectively, cited the principles from the book to brag about their business shrewdness. Napoleon Bonaparte conquered most Europe by applying military innovations, drawing his tactics from different sources, including The Art of War, which already had a French version in early1800s. Cadets at West Point are required to read "The Art of War." So are the many MBA students at top business schools of the nation.

Ok, if it is the institutional policy, there is nothing can be done about it. I again asked the mailroom manager about the text "Tao Te Ching," "Why the inmate cannot have Tao Te Ching?" He apparently did not notice the second text in the envelop and he said he would look into it.

I hope that "Tao Te Ching" is acceptable in the prison.

PS. Read How to overcome without fighting: An introduction to the Taoist approach to conflict resolution.

Why Moral Education Has Not Reduced Racial Profiling? (1)

Key Sun, Ph.D. — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:06:46 +0000

According to a recent news article in USA TODAY, racial profiling and other biased practices by law enforcement agencies are alive and well. For example, in the past year alone, Border Patrol agents have questioned Silvio Torres-Saillant three times in the Greyhound station in Syracuse, N.Y., about his immigration status and citizenship as he purchased tickets or waited in the terminal. The Syracuse University English professor, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen from the Dominican Republic, believes that agents sometimes target people according to their physical looks or accents. Minority students in my classes, many of them have been working or intend to work in the criminal justice fields, share the observation.

It is unfair to assume that administrators in the criminal justice systems (particularly the police agencies) have overlooked the issue of cultural diversity and moral education, because a random survey and my personal observation show that most state and federal law enforcement academies require new recruits to undergo at least several hours of training on the ethical issues and all of the agencies have relevant policies and the code of ethics. Then the question we need to ask: Why moral education has not reduced racial profiling and other biased practices by police?

This question can be examined from several perspectives. For example, the sociological perspective may focus on the relative hierarchy of differing racial and ethnic groups in America as the explanation. From the psychological perspective, however, I think that we need to view prejudiced practices (e.g., racial profiling) not as an issue of lack of morality but as a product and manifestation of cognitive distortions. In other words, racial profiling and other biased practices persist because few efforts in the society and in criminal justice agencies have been made to address the issue of cognitive distortions.

It is important to clarify the meaning of prejudice. Although the term "prejudice" may be associated with negative feelings and behavioral tendency, the essence of prejudice involves distorted cognitions. In particular, prejudice as a type of cognitive schema involves cognitive distortions of social reality, the indicators of which may include erroneous generalization and oversimplification, the formation of social attitudes before or despite objective evidence and other inaccuracies in categorizing, evaluating, and explaining social entities.

In addition, prejudice as a type of cognitive distortions is often conceptualized as a lack of moral value. This immorality or unfair attitude deviates from a normative standard or moral value, such as the principle of fairness, equity, and equality, shared by society. However, we cannot assume prejudice as the cognitive distortions can be rectified simply by improving moral judgment or education. This is because a person uses his/her understanding of social reality to evaluate, explain, encode, accept or deny, adjust or maintain the self's social actions, and react to various situations. Perceivers' unjustified attitudes are based on their distorted perception of social reality so their cognitive distortion rationalizes and justifies their immoral or illegal actions. In other words, people view their unethical conduct (e.g., discrimination and racial profiling) as ethical because their limited and distorted cognitions of social reality serve as the basis for their moral judgments and actions.

There are two main sources of cognitive distortion: (1) stereotypes produced by social categorization; and (2) the prevalence of distorted information about minorities in this country provided by the media, books and other sources.

Research in social psychology has demonstrated that merely categorizing people as in-group and out-group members influences differential thinking, feeling, and behaving toward the in-group and out-group members. This social categorization may influence attitudes and prejudice thoughts, which are often automatic, toward individuals who are seen as out-group members. It includes a tendency to exaggerate differences between groups and similarities within one group and favors the in-group over the out-group. Those with strongest in-group affiliation show the most prejudice. This inclination will create more harm when one group holds much more power than the other group or when resources among in-groups are not distributed equitably.

Another cognitive distortion associated with social categorization involves the misunderstanding of two separate cognitive processes: (1) the deductive process, and (2) the inductive process. The deductive process refers to reasoning from a general concept to a particular observation, or applying a category to explain and make sense of observations. For example, the use of a person's group membership (e.g., race or ethnicity) to explain his/her social actions represents an example of the deductive reasoning. In contrast, the inductive process refers to reasoning from observation to concepts or theories. The source of our knowledge comes from observation or the inductive process. However, when people assume that the deductive process (the use of categories or groups) represents the understanding of social reality, with no discernment of the discrepancy between their mental category and reality (e.g., individuals of observation), they will have stereotypic mental representations of the individuals. The accurate understanding of the two processes involves the discernment that all the concepts or categories we use to describe the world are not features of reality, as we tend to believe, but are creations of the mind; they are parts of the map, not of the territory.

(To be continued...)

Read "Why moral education has not reduced racial profiling? (2)" and

my new post "Racial profiling and a misunderstanding of probability."

Can Race Take the Responsibility for Racially-Motivated Crime?

Key Sun, Ph.D. — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:33:29 +0000

People's social cognitions and perceptions about real events are more complicated than their performances in controlled laboratory settings. How people (particularly the news media) describe and explain bias-motivated crime appears to deviate from, and challenge the findings in the attribution literature of social psychology.

The issues include: (1) a tendency to assign the responsibility to the victims for their victimization, rather than to the offender (see my early post: "Does the victim cause hate crime?"), (2) a tendency to make the external attribution for the violence (e.g., over-emphasizing the offender group affiliation as the explanation for their bias), and (3) the confusion about whether "race" represents a functional group that is capable of taking the responsibility for racially-motivated crime. The current discussion focuses on the remaining two issues.

Attribution theory, as pioneered by Fritz Heider, Hal Kelley, "Ned" Jones, Lee Ross, Bernard Weiner, and other researchers, has immensely impacted the fields of social psychology, organizational psychology, mental health, education, among others. One of the key principles of the theory postulates that individuals attribute causes of outcomes and actions into two types, including "external" and "internal" attributions. The external or situational attribution assigns causality to factors outside the individual whereas the internal or dispositional attribution assigns causality to factors within the person, such as mental capacity, intention, motivation, or other inner characteristics. The distinction between the two is closely related to determining the responsibility of the target person. Attribution is by no means accurate. The fundamental attribution error refers to people's tendency to over-emphasize dispositional or internal explanations for the behavior of others while under-emphasizing situational explanations.

It is unfortunate that there are few recent investigations in the attribution field, though many relevant psychological issues remain to be explored. For example, attribution literature has not adequately explained the reason for two opposite attribution styles: Depressed people over-blame themselves for their negative experiences, whereas psychopaths, who may be found both in prison and in managerial positions, feel no remorse and no responsibility for tormenting others. The current discussion concerns another overlooked issue in attribution research that involves people's (particularly the news media's) misperception about the internal and situational factors for bias-motivated crime.

For the crime, the distinction between the offender's mental state (e.g., using the perceived differences between the offender and victim to rationalize and generate the offense) and the offender's racial or other group affiliations is clear. The former is the internal factor whereas the latter represents the external factor. Although a difference in group membership between the hate offender and victim is often a necessary condition for defining hate crime, recognizing the difference is not sufficient for understanding and overcoming ambiguities in identifying the transgression. Neither is there evidence suggesting that other people sharing the same group membership with the hate offender(s) endorse the hate crime. For example, a recent survey by FBI shows that there were far less than one percent of the members of a particular group (e.g., racial or religious one) who were involved in hate crimes (around 7,000 bias-motivated offenders known to police in the U. S. in 2007). Because both offenders for hate crime and law-abiding people share the same group memberships, the commonalty between criminals and non criminals is an invalid explanation for the offenders' behavior.

However, without hesitation, difficulty, and justification, the news media tends to generalize racially motivated crime as a manifestation of racial or intergroup conflict, as if the offenders were the representatives of their race and had implemented the intention of the category. It is understandable that social contexts, which interact with the offender's distorted cognition and learning experiences, play a role in generating bias-motivated offenses. However, the news media's misattribution creates the impression that it is the offender's race or other group memberships, not the individual offender, which is responsible for the crime. Unscrupulously talking about racial conflicts will certainly increase the circulation and viewing rates for the media, but it does not create any understanding about the offender's mental structure and process that regulate the criminal behavior.

The final issue is both psychological and political one. Although the news media and many researchers in social sciences treat "race" as a "group," racial categories, which denote collections of phenotype-based individuals correlated with some social variables, do not actually possesses the group dynamics. The key group components include leaders and followers who interact or communicate with one another according to their roles or status specified by some explicit or unwritten rules or norms, with their performances characterized by a high level of cohesion and normative consensus and by shared emotional involvement in evaluation and perceptions about the meanings and missions of their actions. Therefore, unlike an organization or a nation that serves as its own agent, a racial category is not a functional group that has the normal bureaucratic structures, can formulate and initiate decisions and actions, thus can take the responsibility for its actions.

In short, instead of blaming the individual offender, the popular explanation about bias-motivated crime is characterized by blaming the victim distinctiveness and the offender's racial or other types of affiliation. Are there any new psychological explanations for the misattributions?