Experimental sleep loss, racial bias, and the decision criterion to shoot in the Police Officer’s Dilemma task
| dc.citation.articleNumber | 20581 | |
| dc.citation.journalTitle | Scientific Reports | |
| dc.citation.volumeNumber | 10 | |
| dc.contributor.author | Scullin, Michael K. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Hebl, Michelle R. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Corrington, Abby | |
| dc.contributor.author | Nguyen, Stacy | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-12-16T19:47:26Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2020-12-16T19:47:26Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Violent behavior, police brutality, and racial discrimination are currently at the forefront of society’s attention, and they should be. We investigated whether mild sleep loss—as typical for many adults throughout the work week—could aggravate the socio-emotional-cognitive processes contributing to violence and discrimination. In a sample of 40 healthy young adults, we either experimentally restricted participants’ sleep for four nights (6.2 h/night) or let participants obtain normal sleep (7.7 h/night)—and then had them complete the Police Officer’s Dilemma Task. In this computerized task, the participant must rapidly decide to shoot or not shoot at White and Black men who either are or are not holding a gun. Results showed significant racial biases, including more and quicker shooting of Black targets compared to White targets. Furthermore, signal detection analyses demonstrated that mild sleep restriction changed participants’ decision criterion, increasing the tendency to shoot, even when controlling for psychomotor vigilance, fluid intelligence, and self-reported desirability to behave in a socially acceptable manner. The increased tendency to shoot was also observed in participants who reported believing that they had adapted to the sleep loss. Future experimental research using trained police officers will help establish the generalizability of these laboratory effects. Importantly, sleep loss is modifiable via organization-level changes (e.g., shift scheduling, light entrainment) and individual-level interventions (e.g., sleep hygiene education, incentives for behavioral change), suggesting that if sleep loss is corrected, it could save lives—including Black lives. | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Scullin, Michael K., Hebl, Michelle R., Corrington, Abby, et al.. "Experimental sleep loss, racial bias, and the decision criterion to shoot in the Police Officer’s Dilemma task." <i>Scientific Reports,</i> 10, (2020) Springer Nature: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77522-z. | |
| dc.identifier.digital | s41598-020-77522-z | |
| dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77522-z | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1911/109746 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.publisher | Springer Nature | |
| dc.rights | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. | |
| dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| dc.title | Experimental sleep loss, racial bias, and the decision criterion to shoot in the Police Officer’s Dilemma task | |
| dc.type | Journal article | |
| dc.type.dcmi | Text | |
| dc.type.publication | publisher version |
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