Summary
The current study was an attempt to establish a link between the use of an affect heuristic and racial bias in the context of a decision-making task. It was hypothesized that participants' ratings of criminality related to an alleged perpetrator of a crime, at least forparticipants under time-pressure, would be determined by the perpetrator's race and thatthis would, in turn, depend on the level of affect aroused by the crime. Two hundredparticipants ( 136 females and 64 males) read one of four possible versions of anexperimenter-constructed newspaper article describing a crime and were asked to makeseveral criminality judgments about the perpetrator. The four versions of the newspaperarticle differed such that the race of the alleged perpetrator (black vs. white perpetrator),as well as the affect associated with the impact on the victim (strong negative affect vs.weak negative affect) were manipulated. Also, in order to explore the possibility ofheuristic information processing, half of the participants were asked to complete theexperimental task before a given deadline expired while the remaining participants weregiven as much time as need in order to complete the experimental task. The results of thestudy indicate that, despite evidence for the use of an affect heuristic by participants who were under time-pressure, contrary to predictions the alleged perpetrator was rated nomore unfavorably on the criminality measures when his race was black than when his race was white. The implications of the current study regarding racial profiling are discussed.