Looking at my numbers, it would appear I judge by color. I don’t consider myself racist; but, apparently I shoot quicker on Black Armed men, and I give the unarmed Black men a longer look before I decide not to shoot.

Average reaction time:
Black Armed:578ms
Black Unarmed:709.6ms
White Armed:578.72ms
White Unarmed:708.36ms

For me, the only thing to be gained from this little exercise is determining whether or not the person is armed. And the test is very unrealistic – would be better if the ‘perp’ was walking or running toward or away from you. I think that would be a more telling indicator: are we more fearful of a black man or white man running toward us?

This may be one of the stupidest tests i have ever seen to try to dig into the mind of a person facing a life or death decision. Especially when considering that I tried as hard as i could to look at the hands, or where i thought the hands would be when the image appeared, and paid no attention to the face or other areas of the picture. The was no emotion involved in the test and any slight different in time to decide if a person was unarmed was due to a lack contrast between the color of the hand and the color of the object that was being held.

Do cops give the benefit of doubt to white people over black people in certain neighborhoods? most likely. But this test can not prove or disprove that theory. Nor does it come close to doing anything but perpetuating the myth that police officers always assume the worse when encountering an African American.

Stupid test, no credibility should be given to it.

I’m clearly faster at determining an unarmed white guy. I’m not sure that 20 ms is sufficient for that sample to say that I’m quicker to pull the trigger on armed black guys than white guys.

My question is to formatting. I felt the way they led into pictures, and the backgrounds used led to quicker responses for certain scenes. I’d be curious to see how that skews results.

I’m pretty sure though the two times I got it wrong was the reverse of my scores. I let an armed black guy shoot me, and I shot an unarmed white guy.

This numbers make sense to me. Armed times are the fastest because guns are relatively easy to recognize (at least in this test). Times for Black Armed and White Armed are essentially the same.

Unarmed times are considerably longer across the board because it took longer to process what the target was holding. My thought process probably went like this:
Find target
Find target’s hand
Is it a gun? If yes, shoot.
If no, what is it?

I only holstered after categorically figuring out what the target was holding, so deciding it wasn’t a gun wasn’t enough, I needed to know what it was (wallet, phone, etc).

Times for Black Unarmed is longer than White Unarmed for that reason. Dark hands and dark objects made it slightly more difficult to recognize the held object.

My scores:
Average reaction time:
Black Armed:784.92ms
Black Unarmed:793ms
White Armed:757.52ms
White Unarmed:822.48ms

Definitely faster to differentiate for Black than White.