STATE OF THE ARTCRIME ALERT!How Think ing about a Single SuspectAutom atically Shifts Stereotypes towardan Entire Gro up1Scott A. AkalisDepartment of Psychol ogy, Harvard UniversityMahzarin R. BanajiDepartment of Psychol ogy, Harvard UniversityStephen M. KosslynDepartment of Psychol ogy, Harvard UniversityAbstractCrime alerts are meant to raise community awareness and identify individual criminalsuspects; they are not expected to affe ct attitudes and beliefs toward the social group towhich an individual suspect belong s. However, psycholo gical principles of learning,categorization, and memory predict that what is learned about an instance can colorperception of an entire category. At the intersection of psychology, criminal justice,sociology, and media st udies, two experiments were conducted to test the effect thatproviding individual racial identity in crime alerts has on racial group stereotypes. InExperiment 1, participants vis ualized four scenarios involving B lack or Wh ite would-becriminals. Results revealed that in the case where Black would-be criminals were madesalient in memory, participants demonstrated significantly more negative implicit stereotypestoward Blacks as a group compared with a condition in which White would-be criminalswere more salient in memory. In Experiment 2, participants read a written description ofa crime scene with a suspect who was either depicted as White or Black, and thenimagined the suspect. On both i mplicit an d explicit measures of group stereotypesobtained afterward, participants who read about a Black crimina l reported and revealedmore anti-Black0pro-Wh ite stereotypes than did those who read about a White criminal.Crime alerts that mention r acial i dentity, whatever their benefit, come with the burden ofshifting stereotypes of social groups. In this context , the value of racial identification incrime alerts warrants reconsideration.Keywords: Stereotypes, Implicit Attitudes, Crime, IAT, Social Cognition, ImageryDu Bois Review, 5:2 ( 2008) 217–233.© 2008 W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African a nd African American Rese arch 1742-058X008 $15.00doi:10.10170S1742058X08080181217INTRODUCTIONCommunity crime alerts ar e attempts to prevent burglaries, assaults, rapes, andmurders. One cannot help but encounter such notices on an almost daily basis;frequently the y take the form of posted flyers, listserv e-mails, or media announce-ments. What they ge nerally have in common is a vague description of a suspect anda summary of the crime that he or she alleg edly comm itted at a nearby location.Actually apprehending the suspect based on such a vague description is impossible inmany cases, and so the primary purpose is often to raise aware ness w ith th e hope ofreducing the number of future victims.The un derlying assumption behind community crime alerts seems to be t hatpeople will encode a description of a suspect in order to recall it in re levant situa-tions, such as the next time they are walking in the area of the original crime and areapproached by a person who closely resembles the suspect de scription. Although thisassumption se ems reasonable on its face, research ers have yet to ev aluate directlywhether people will remember and use crime alert information in t his way, andwhether such vigil ance will preve nt future crime s. Of more immediate interest h ere,however, is the investigatio n of a po tential cost of crime alerts.RACE, CRIM E, AND THE MEDIABlacks are overr epresented in crime alerts, and the same is true in the media ingeneral. However, unlik e th e effects of crime a lerts ~which have not be en previouslystudied!, numerous researchers have s tudied the effects of negative depictions ofBlacks i n the media.To begin , re searchers have documented the overrepresent ation of Bla cks asperpetrators in news stories ~Entman 1990, 1992!. Underlining t he potential conse-quences of such overrepresentation, Travis Dixon ~2008! uncovered a striking asso-ciation: exposure to network news correlates with endorsement of Bla ck stereotypes~e.g., more hours spent watching the news tends to equate with a stronger view ofBlacks as intimidating!. Dixon also found t hat exposure to ne twork news wa s associ-ated with lowered estimates of Black income and higher racism scores.Mary Beth Oliver and Dana Fonash ~2002! exp lored this int ersection of mediaand race experimen tally. They had p articipants read news articles a bout Black andWhite men committing crimes and fo und that participants were more likely later tomisidentify Black men as having committed violent crimes.In brief, research on the depiction of race and crime in the media has s hown thatan overrepresentati on of Black cr iminals in toda y’s media has fostered negativestereotypes and beliefs about Blacks as a group. Given a similar overrepresentation ofBlacks in community crime alerts , it makes sense to examine the nature and magni-tude of the effect th at these alerts may have on the perception of Blacks.PSYCHOLOGY OF LEAR NING, CATEGORIZATION, AN D MEMORYPsychological research predicts that cr ime alerts, although ce rtainly not intended todo anyone harm, may nonethele ss propagate negative stereotyp es regarding theentire social group to which an individual suspect belongs. Re search on learning,categorization, and memory suggests that information about individuals often affectsperception of whole groups, a nd research o n attitudes an d beliefs suggests thatstereotypes c an be easily shifted by even subtle and logically irrelevant information.Scott A. Akalis et al.218DU BOIS REVIEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON RACE 5:2, 2008Together, such research points to the possibility that crime a lert information may notbe used sparingly and responsibly, but with reckless application to entire groups ofpeople sharing only very general resemblance to the suspect, even in situa tionsunlikely to involve crime.A sizeable psychological liter ature suggests that informa tion about individualscan affect how entire social groups are viewed. Such eff ects can aris e via differentpaths. One such path occurs when learning about instances generalizes to knowledgeabout a category; anoth er path unfolds when me mory of an individual biases reason-ing about a category.The psychologist Gordon Allport once said, “Given a thimbleful of facts we rushto make generalizat ions a s large as a tub ,” and, indeed, numerous findings suggestthat the behavior of one individ ual can color perceptions