Racial stereotypes bias the neural representation of objects towards perceived weapons

Police officers are more likely to use deadly force against unarmed Black compared with unarmed White individuals in the US. One mechanism that may contribute to these disparities is a transient perceptual distortion driven by racial stereotypes, whereby innocuous objects (e.g., wallet or tool) are more likely to be perceived as weapons in the context of Black individuals as compared with members of other racial groups. Here we provide neuroimaging evidence that a bias in visual representation due to automatically activated racial stereotypes may be a novel mechanism underlying this phenomenon. During fMRI, Black-primed tools induced neural response patterns that exhibited a biased similarity to independent gun images in object- discriminative regions of the ventral temporal cortex involved in the visual perception of objects. Moreover, these neural representational shifts predicted the magnitude of participants’ racial bias as evident in their response-time patterns during weapon identification. Together, these findings suggest that stereotypes can impinge on the visual representation of socially relevant objects in ways that confirm their preconceived notions, in turn contributing to racially biased responding. Such findings may point to novel, perceptually driven pathways that have the power to combat certain forms of social biases.