Stereotype threat in police encounters: Exploring generalizability, mechanisms, and interventions

Stereotypes in the U.S. associate Black and Hispanic people with crime. While much evidence suggests that Black people are negatively affected by the risk that police officers might judge them in light of such criminalizing stereotypes, Hispanic people’s psychological experiences of stereotype threat in police encounters are unexplored. We present four studies to illuminate how people of different racial and ethnic identities experience police encounters in phenomenologically distinct ways. Hispanic and Black participants were both more concerned than White participants about being stereotyped as criminal when considering police encounters in the abstract (Study 1) and imagining a specific hypothetical police encounter (Study 2). These effects generalized to community members who viewed an image of a White police officer to envision in the hypothetical encounter (Studies 3 and 4). Further, past experiences of policing, especially racial profiling, contributed to group differences in feelings of threat (Studies 1–4). Additionally, neither making counter-stereotypical representations about one’s identity salient (Study 3) nor presenting the hypothetical officer’s precinct as racially diverse (Study 4) mitigated Hispanic and Black participants’ anticipated feelings of threat. We consider potential impacts of our findings that police encounters are more psychologically burdensome for Hispanic and Black people than White people.