Glad (for you) I’m not a cop…

…although presumably if I was a law enforcement officer with a gun I’d get some training.

Anyway, in Nick Kristof’s article on unconscious racism today he links to a “shooter effect” test on the University of Chicago website. The photograph above is not me, in case you’re wondering. It’s from the “shooter effect” test, which is a computer game where you have to make a snap decision whether to fire at an armed man or holster your weapon for an unarmed man (it’s all men). Some of the men are black and some are white. The test is to see whether there is an unconscious tendency to shoot people of one race more quickly than another, or to shoot them more often when they’re unarmed.

Here are my results:

Your Score: 70
Average reaction time:
Black Armed:862.44ms
Black Unarmed:931.72ms
White Armed:775.8ms
White Unarmed:1381.16ms

So first off, I’m crappy at computer games due to lack of practice. It’s many years since I played a first person shooter role game. In fact the only one I’ve ever played extensively was Tomb Raider. My reactions are slow and sometimes my fingers don’t do what I want them to do. I also have a very high resolution set on my monitor, which makes pictures look smaller. End of excuses.

Second, because of that I found the game so fast-paced that I barely had time to see the guns in some of the pictures, especially where the gun was held against the body. I tried simply to look for the gun since that was all I had time to do, and sometimes didn’t manage that before the time was up. In other words, I didn’t have the time to consciously process someone’s race, which I guess is the point.

Third, I’m considerably quicker at shooting an armed white man than an armed black man. Yikes! I’m prejudiced against white people.

Fourth, I’m quicker to shoot an unarmed black man than an unarmed white man. So I’m prejudiced against black people too!

I don’t know whether points #3 and #4 cancel each other out, or whether I’m generally misanthropic.

I hope that the proportions of people holding guns against the body or away from the body is the same with both races, because that’s what makes the big difference in reaction time for me. When the gun is held against the body it’s more difficult to find. Presumably the researchers thought about this though.

Conclusion: Um, I don’t have a conclusion. I don’t know what to make of my results.

How did you do? Want to post your scores below?

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