Joshua Correll, a member of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology faculty, in conjunction with his work with the Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory, has created The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a video game that tests the effect of racial bias on decisions to shoot.

When you launch the game, you are presented with a series of images of young men against various backgrounds. Some of the men hold guns, while others hold innocent items like cellphones or soda cans. Half of the men are black and half are white. You must shoot all armed men but holster your gun at the sight of those who are unarmed. The game tests whether the target’s race influences the decision to shoot. The results are chilling:

Participants shoot an armed target more quickly and more often when that target is Black, rather than White. However, participants decide not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly and more often when the target is White, rather than Black. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites).

To play the game, you can test yourself with the beta version. You may be shocked by the results.

(Via On the Ground.)

How perceptive are you? How accurately do you see the world?

With a quiz created by Jeremy Wolfe, Ph.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Visual Attention Lab and Harvard Medical School, test yourself for change blindness — the perplexing difficulty that all of us have in perceiving alterations in the things that are right in front of our eyes.

As philosopher Henri Bergson once said, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

(Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for so kindly sending me the link to this story.)

On Tuesday, June 24, 2008, influential thinker and ADR pioneer Albie Davis presents an “Intuition and Creativity Workshop” for mediators at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.

Albie enjoys a well-deserved reputation as a true innovator who has made significant contributions to the development and advancement of mediation and conflict resolution during the course of her decades-long career.

From the workshop description:

You tune up your car every few thousand miles. Schedule annual health exams. Is it time for an Intuition and Creativity Tune-up of your mediator readiness? Mediators must think on their feet; use the famed five senses, plus ones with no name; make rapid assessments of the need of parties and momentum of negotiations; be on the lookout for “magical moments,” draw upon theory, research, ethics and personal practice; separate the wheat from the chaff; and more. In this day-long seminar, we will revisit various theories about mediation, negotiation, creativity, change, culture and human behavior. Drawing upon the experience of presenters and participants, we’ll role-play, invent and try new things; be irreverent, if we must. Each person will leave with a self-administered intuition checkup sheet with strengths identified and tips for improving one’s personal best.

I am proud to say that Albie Davis recently joined my firm, OptionBridge, as an affiliate, and my partners and I are deeply honored to be able to offer this program to our colleagues in the mediation community in June. To register, visit the OptionBridge web site, or for more information click here to download the flyer in PDF.