Perceiving Police Aggression in the Digital Age

Seemingly every week a new video clip of a violent encounter between a police officer and a civilian goes viral. Often the police officer is White and the civilian is a racial or ethnic minority. Existing attribution models that were largely proposed before the internet existed are not adequate to understand how police and civilians are perceived in this modern era. In this talk, I focus on how police are perceived. I will present results from several studies and draw on insight from classic attribution theories to propose a new framework for understanding how attribution occurs when we perceive people from viral videos and other information available to us on the internet.