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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.
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Sleep Deprivation and Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot: A Diffusion Model Analysis
The current study examines the effect of sleep deprivation and caffeine use on racial bias in the decision to shoot. Participants deprived of sleep for 24 hr (vs. rested participants) made more errors in a shooting task and were more likely to shoot unarmed targets. A diffusion decision model analysis revealed sleep deprivation decreased participants’ ability to extract information from the stimuli, whereas caffeine impacted the threshold separation, reflecting decreased caution. Neither sleep deprivation nor caffeine moderated anti-Black racial bias in shooting decisions or at the process level. We discuss how our results clarify discrepancies in past work testing the impact of fatigue on racial bias in shooting decisions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1756092
- PAR ID:
- 10547103
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Social Psychological and Personality Science
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1948-5506
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 638-647
- Size(s):
- p. 638-647
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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