Crosscultural Police-Citizen Interactions: The Influence of Race,Beliefs, and Nonverbal Communication on Impression Formation1

Several studies done in both the United States and Europe suggest that police officers assess black citizens more negatively than they do white citizens. In this article, it is hypothesized that this differential treatment is caused by a lack of correspondence between a white police officer and a black citizen. Two experiments are reported that examine the impact of three different kinds of lack of correspondence-in race, beliefs, and nonverbal behavior–on the formation of the impression that the citizen is a suspect in the committal of a crime. The results revealed that black nonverbal behavior and dissimilar beliefs resulted in a negative assessment. Black skin color resulted in an unpredicted positive effect. Some implications of these results for more traditional analyses of prejudice and discrimination will be discussed.     

The Job Search Process: An Attitudinal and Behavioral Analysis

Job search attitudes and behaviors among college students were studied. Major job-seeking factors were identified and discussed in relation to job search experience.     

QUALIA UND PHYSIKALISMUS

Qualia and Physicalism. It is assumed that the following three relations exhaust the possibilities for a physicalist account of qualia: 1. determination, 2. identity, 3. realization. The first relation is immediately rejected because it does not exclude property dualism. The second faces the problem that it is probably impossible to discriminate empirically between the identity thesis and the epiphenomenalist position. The third cannot handle qualia adequately, for qualia are not functional properties and the realization relation is only plausible as a relation between physical realizers and functional properties. Finally, if one attempts to replace multiple realization by multiple identities it is shown that the notion of multiple property identities is unintelligible. The upshot is that if these three relations exhaust the possibilities of a physicalist construal of qualia then physicalism is wrong. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.