White participants rated black men as more capable of doing harm than white men of the same physical stature and size. Black participants exhibited no such bias. They then showed nonblack study participants a series of faces and asked them to imagine that the person depicted had “behaved aggressively toward a police officer but was not wielding a weapon.” Study participants thought that the police officer would be justified in using more force to subdue the black men in this situation compared with the white men.
