Police Brutality

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Police Brutality is the excessive utilization of force, usually physically, but also frequent in various forms of verbal assaults and psychological constraint, by a police officer. The idea of police brutality has been recorded throughout history and has repeats itself today. Starting back in July 1917 occurred the East St. Louis Massacre, the “most brutal riots” against Blacks that included bloody violence of “white folks attacking African-Americans” due to “racial competition and conflict” during the event of World War I (Lind, 2015; Buescher). Without a doubt, there tensions between the white and blacks and also between the police force and the black community. These occurrences did not stop here, but continues to repeat itself with riots …show more content…

Social cognition depends first and far most on information and accurate information is needed to understand a person. Sometimes we have very little information to base our judgment on, yet that does not stop us from making further intuitions about other people or situations. Psychologist, Janine Willis and Alex Todorov, have demonstrated this fact through a Face perception research or snap judgments study— (Gilovich et al, 2012). In this study, participants were shown a variety of faces and their task was to rate how attractive, aggressive, liable, trustworthy, and competent each person seemed. The results displayed that people are more likely approach those they perceive as trustworthy and not aggressive and less likely to approach that they anticipant as untrustworthy and aggressive (Gilovich et al, 2012). In the case of racism, the heated relationship between the white policemen and black community is related to the first impression of each party that created stereotypes based on their …show more content…

Conformity is changing your behavior or beliefs in order to be correspondent with other satisfying the need to belong (Gilovich et al, 2012). According to psychologists, the need to belong is being part of a group, which leads to many benefits such as security, connections to potential mating partners, and resources (Gilovich et al, 2012). Conformity can be determined by two mechanisms: informational social influence and normative social influence. Psychologist, Sherif, demonstrated the influence of normative social influence in conformity using an Autokinetic effect where participants in this study were asked to estimate how much a stationary point in a dark room has moved. Results from the study showed that there was deviations in answers between the answers gave while participants were separated from everyone else contrasted with the answers they gave while in a gathering (Gilovich et al, 2012). Participants reported that reason for their adjustment in answers was because they were uncertain where the dot was actually moving and therefore they looked at their surroundings for the correct answer. (Gilovich et al, 2012). In order to properly understand how informational social influence is involved in the protest in Baltimore, it is important to take the some of the events in South Africa into

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Police Brutality