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.