The Nature of Racial Bias in the Weapon Identification Task: Discrimination Bias, Response Bias, or Both?

In the Weapon Identification Task (WIT), participants more often misclassify innocuous objects (e.g., tools) as weapons after seeing a Black compared to a White male face prime. Racially biased object discrimination (discrimination bias) and biased response tendencies (response bias) have been proposed as cognitive mechanisms underlying this weapon identification bias. In three experiments (total N = 1.015), we manipulated base‐rates of target objects in the WIT and used a generalized process dissociation model to disentangle discrimination bias and response bias. Our results show that response bias is the major source of racial bias in the WIT, while discrimination bias plays a role under specific circumstances only. Specifically, when participants are explicitly instructed to use racial profiling for responding, discrimination bias comes into play in addition to response bias. This suggests that object discrimination is systematically distorted in the WIT whenever racial profiling is used as a response strategy.