Multi-group data versus dual-side theory: On race contrasts and police-caused homicides

Empirical evidence points to a persistent Black-White racial gap in police-caused homicides. Some scholarship treats the gap as denoting criminal justice exposure either in terms of involvement in crime or living in a high-crime context. By contrast, health scholarship typically points to the importance of racism including the attitudes, institutional practices, and overall structures that operate to privilege one group over another. Still, given the demographics of US society, the Black-White racial contrast overlooks the 25% of Americans who are neither Black nor White: Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians. The question of how the groups should be organized vis-a-vis the current Black-White model and theories arises. An answer is not straightforward. There is a rank-ordering to the groups' mortality rates as well as an exponential increase in the number of possible comparisons. In this paper we systematically review the literature on race and police-caused homicide with a particular focus on studies that attempt to move beyond the Black-White model. We find that studies on race and police-caused homicide either make no comparison between the groups, or, alternatively, use a White-non-White, a Black-non-Black, and/or a Black-Native American-Latino vs. White-Asian comparison. We use data on group-specific mortality rates to examine the strengths and limits of each of these practices. The limits are the selection of counterfactual gaps, the selection of smaller gaps, and/or the omission of larger gaps. To address these limits, we propose that a Black-Native American vs. Latino-White-Asian model best captures the higher and lower mortality rates in police-caused homicide data.

The weaponization of medicine: Early psychosis in the Black community and the need for racially informed mental healthcare

There is a notable disparity between the observed prevalence of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders in racialized persons in the United States and Canada and White individuals in these same countries, with Black people being diagnosed at higher rates than other groups. The consequences thereof bring a progression of lifelong punitive societal implications, including reduced opportunities, substandard care, increased contact with the legal system, and criminalization. Other psychological conditions do not show such a wide racial gap as a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder diagnosis. New data show that the differences are not likely to be genetic, but rather societal in origin. Using real-life examples, we discuss how overdiagnoses are largely rooted in the racial biases of clinicians and compounded by higher rates of traumatizing stressors among Black people due to racism. The forgotten history of psychosis in psychology is highlighted to help explain disparities in light of the relevant historical context. We demonstrate how misunderstanding race confounds attempts to diagnose and treat schizophrenia-spectrum disorders in Black individuals. A lack of culturally informed clinicians exacerbates problems, and implicit biases prevent Black patients from receiving proper treatment from mainly White mental healthcare professionals, which can be observed as a lack of empathy. Finally, we consider the role of law enforcement as stereotypes combined with psychotic symptoms may put these patients in danger of police violence and premature mortality. Improving treatment outcomes requires an understanding of the role of psychology in perpetuating racism in healthcare and pathological stereotypes. Increased awareness and training can improve the plight of Black people with severe mental health disorders. Essential steps necessary at multiple levels to address these issues are discussed.

Let's Talk about Stats: Revising Our Approach to Teaching Statistics in Psychology

Undergraduate statistics in psychology is an important, often challenging, course for students. The focus in psychology tends to be on hypothesis tests, such as t tests and analysis of variance. While adequate for some questions, there are many other topics we might include that could improve that data analytic abilities of students and improve psychological science in the long run. Topics such as generalized linear modeling, multilevel modeling, Bayesian statistics, model building and comparison, and causal analysis, could be introduced in an undergraduate psychological statistics course. For each topic, I discuss their importance and provide sources for instructor's continuing education. These topics would give students greater flexibility in analyzing data, allow them to conduct more meaningful analyses, allow them to understand more modern data analytic approaches, and potentially help the field of psychology in the long run, by being one part of the strategy to address the reproducibility problem.

Contextualizing the Experiences of Black Women Arrested for Intimate Partner Violence in Canada

This qualitative study was informed by critical race feminism and explored Black women's experiences with the police with a particular focus on how issues of race, racism, oppression, and subordination inform their experiences. It sought to answer three research questions: (1) What is known about Black women's experiences with the police in the context of intimate partner violence? (2) Given their experiences with the police, what is their perception of the police? and (3) To what extent do women construct counter-narratives of their experiences with the police and what does that involve? The sample was comprised of 25 participants, 15 of whom were arrested. The women were over the age of 18 and lived in the Greater Toronto Area and surrounding areas. Most women expressed that they had negative encounters with the police, which was influenced by the police's negative perceptions of them. Black women who called the police to intervene in an intimate partner violence incident were subjected to great scrutiny and vulnerable to racialized and gendered police violence. Consequently, women were fearful and distrustful of the police and were less likely to seek help from them in the future. The study answers the call for research that examines Black women's experiences with the police from their perspective. It has implications for social service providers and provides strategies to improve future police interactions with Black communities.

A Causal Framework for Cross-Cultural Generalizability

Behavioral researchers increasingly recognize the need for more diverse samples that capture the breadth of human experience. Current attempts to establish generalizability across populations focus on threats to validity, constraints on generalization, and the accumulation of large, cross-cultural data sets. But for continued progress, we also require a framework that lets us determine which inferences can be drawn and how to make informative cross-cultural comparisons. We describe a generative causal-modeling framework and outline simple graphical criteria to derive analytic strategies and implied generalizations. Using both simulated and real data, we demonstrate how to project and compare estimates across populations and further show how to formally represent measurement equivalence or inequivalence across societies. We conclude with a discussion of how a formal framework for generalizability can assist researchers in designing more informative cross-cultural studies and thus provides a more solid foundation for cumulative and generalizable behavioral research.

The only thing that can stop bad causal inference is good causal inference

In psychology, causal inference - both the transport from lab estimates to the real world and estimation on the basis of observational data - is often pursued in a casual manner. Underlying assumptions remain unarticulated; potential pitfalls are compiled in post-hoc lists of flaws. The field should move on to coherent frameworks of causal inference and generalizability that have been developed elsewhere.

Reply to the commentaries: A radical revision of experimental social psychology is still needed

Are the landscapes of real-world decisions adequately represented in our laboratory tasks? Are the goals and expertise of experimental participants the same as real-world decision-makers? Are we neglecting crucial forces that lead to group outcomes? Are the contingencies necessary for producing experimental demonstrations of bias present in the real world? In the target article, I argued that the answers to these questions are needed to understand whether and how laboratory research can inform real-world group disparities. Most of the commentaries defending experimental social psychology neglected to directly address these main arguments. The commentaries defending implicit bias only revealed the inadequacy of this concept for explaining group disparities. The major conclusions from the target article remain intact, suggesting that experimental social psychology must undergo major changes to contribute to our understanding of group disparities.

Police Violence and Public Health

Despite their enormous potential impact on population health and health inequities, police violence and use of excessive force have only recently been addressed from a public health perspective. Moving to change this state of affairs, this article considers police violence in the USA within a social determinants and health disparities framework, highlighting recent literature linking this exposure to mental health symptoms, physical health conditions, and premature mortality. The review demonstrates that police violence is common in the USA; is disproportionately directed toward Black, Latinx, and other marginalized communities; and exerts a significant and adverse effect on a broad range of health outcomes. The state-sponsored nature of police violence, its embedding within a historical and contemporary context of structural racism, and the unique circumstances of the exposure itself make it an especially salient and impactful form of violence exposure, both overlapping with and distinct from other forms of violence. We conclude by noting potential solutions that clinicaly psychology and allied fields may offer to alleviate the impact of police violence, while simultaneously recognizing that a true solution to this issue requires a drastic reformation or replacement of the criminal justice system, as well as addressing the broader context of structural and systemic racism in the USA. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, Volume 18 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

"I'm Wise to the Game": How Inner-City Women Experience and Navigate Police Raids

Despite the plethora of research on inner-city policing, little is known about how women experience and make sense of involuntary police encounters. Based upon interviews with women who had their homes raided by police in Toronto's inner-city, this paper explores how these marginalized women perceive, navigate, and resist normative gender expectations in their interactions with police officers during raids. Our findings demonstrate that women believed officers treated them according to gendered stereotypes, and in response, women strategically deployed gendered presentations in an effort to resist, negotiate, and temper anticipated raid related harms. However, participants' positionality constrained their efforts.

What Can Experimental Studies of Bias Tell Us About Real-World Group Disparities?

This article questions the widespread use of experimental social psychology to understand real-world group disparities. Standard experimental practice is to design studies in which participants make judgments of targets who vary only on the social categories to which they belong. This is typically done under simplified decision landscapes and with untrained decision makers. For example, to understand racial disparities in police shootings, researchers show pictures of armed and unarmed Black and White men to undergraduates and have them press "shoot" and "don't shoot" buttons. Having demonstrated categorical bias under these conditions, researchers then use such findings to claim that real-world disparities are also due to decision-maker bias. I describe three flaws inherent in this approach, flaws which undermine any direct contribution of experimental studies to explaining group disparities. First, the decision landscapes used in experimental studies lack crucial components present in actual decisions (Missing Information Flaw). Second, categorical effects in experimental studies are not interpreted in light of other effects on outcomes, including behavioral differences across groups (Missing Forces Flaw). Third, there is no systematic testing of whether the contingencies required to produce experimental effects are present in real-world decisions (Missing Contingencies Flaw). I apply this analysis to three research topics to illustrate the scope of the problem. I discuss how this research tradition has skewed our understanding of the human mind within and beyond the discipline and how results from experimental studies of bias are generally misunderstood. I conclude by arguing that the current research tradition should be abandoned.