Phillip Atiba Goff
Biographic Data
| ID | 178342 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Phillip Atiba Goff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Phillip Atiba |
| FAMILY NAME | Goff |
| SIGNATURE | GOFF P A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4316-2870 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 875 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Measuring Racial Disparities in Police Use of Force
The Threat of Appearing Racist
Recent research in the United States has argued that the threat of confirming the “racist cop” stereotype may paradoxically increase the propensity for coercive policing by depressing officers’ self-legitimacy. The current study aimed to assess the influence of the threat of the “racist cop” stereotype on officers’ self-legitimacy and their attitudes toward force in an Australian policing jurisdiction. An online survey was completed by 306 frontl…
Toward a Psychological Science of Abolition Democracy
We call for psychologists to expand their thinking on fair and just public safety by engaging with the “Abolition Democracy” framework that W. E. B. Du Bois articulated as the need to dissolve slavery while simultaneously taking affirmative steps to rid its toxic consequences from the body politic. Because the legacies of slavery continue to produce disparities in public safety in the United States, both harming Black people and the institutions …
Perspectives on Policing
The Editorial Committee of the Annual Review of Criminology has launched a new section within the journal in which we invite one or more authors to write a more personal and yet scholarly article that puts forth their perspective on an important and timely topic. For Volume 4, we asked Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff and Dr. Cynthia Lum to provide their perspectives on policing. We hope our readers enjoy this new and exciting series of “Perspectives.”
Risky Situations
Swencionis & Goff identified five situations that tend to increase the likelihood that an individual police officer may behave in a racially disparate way: discretion, inexperience, salience of crime, cognitive demand, and identity threat. This article applies their framework to the realities of police work, identifying situations and assignments in which these factors are likely to influence officers’ behavior. These insights may identify opport…
Policing alienated minorities in divided cities
Minority groups frequently challenge the legitimacy of legal authorities, particularly the police. Without trust and legitimacy, the police encounter constant conflict and cannot function effectively. While past research has examined minorities’ perceptions of the police, national minorities provide an interesting and under‐investigated test case because of their inherent identity conflict with the state. The current research examines three facto…
Predicting Bad Policing
Despite an increase in research relating to racial disparities in policing-particularly in the area of deadly force-there have been comparatively few attempts to theorize which factors predict disparate policing. We fill this gap by combining routine activity theory from criminology with situationist approaches to discrimination from social psychology. We propose that disparate policing is most likely to occur when officers who are vulnerable to …
The criminogenic and psychological effects of police stops on adolescent black and Latino boys
Significance Four waves of longitudinal survey data demonstrate that contact with law enforcement predicts increases in black and Latino adolescents’ self-reported criminal behaviors 6, 12, and 18 months later. These results are partially mediated by psychological distress. The younger boys are when stopped for the first time, the stronger these relationships. Boys’ race and prior engagement in delinquent behaviors did not moderate the effect. Th…
On creating ethical, productive, and durable research partnerships with police officers and their departments
Translational policing science must begin with explicitly communicated research aims and a shared vision for promoting safety. For researchers to approach police departments without first considering the concerns held by officers and their departments at large, is unethical, unproductive, and undermines efforts to secure longstanding mutually useful researcher-practitioner partnerships. In presenting a case study analysis of the multi-method Nati…
Bodycams and Gender Equity
Law enforcement agencies, community advocates and policymakers hope that the widespread adoption of police bodycams will alleviate racial disparities and reduce misconduct and use of force. Racial justice has been central to this conversation, but gender justice has not. This essay takes an intersectional, gendered look at bodycam policies, challenging the assumption that officers will act more fairly when they know they are being recorded. Bodyc…
Implications of research staff demographics for psychological science
Long-standing research traditions in psychology have established the fundamental impact of social categories, such as race and gender, on people's perceptions of themselves and others, as well as on general human cognition and behavior. However, there is a general tendency to ignore research staff demographics (e.g., researchers' race and gender) in research development and research reports. Variation in research staff demographics can exert syst…
The psychological science of racial bias and policing
Protecting Whiteness
Focusing on intergroup anti-non-White bias in the criminal justice system, little attention is given to how Whites may additionally be protected from negative police treatment. This study examines intragroup bias via perceived suspect phenotypic racial stereotypicality (e.g., how strongly members possess physical features typical of their racial group) on severity of police use of force. It is hypothesized that the Whiter one appears, the more th…
Justice from within
The Impact of Psychological Science on Policing in the United States
The May 2015 release of the report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing highlighted a fundamental change in the issues dominating discussions about policing in America. That change has moved discussions away from a focus on what is legal or effective in crime control and toward a concern for how the actions of the police influence public trust and confidence in the police. This shift in discourse has been motivated by two factor…
The essence of innocence
The social category "children" defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers. We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less "childlike" than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics …
(The Need for) A Model of Translational Mind Science Justice Research
Despite the historical importance of translational research to social psychological investigations of social justice issues, the culture and incentives of contemporary social psychology are ambivalent towards non-experimental field research. This ambivalence poses a significant impediment to social psychology’s role in societal change. This paper offers a brief history of how the field evolved from a relative emphasis on translating social psycho…
A Taste for Justice
This article examines attention to justice cues in the novel context of the nascent democracy of Tanzania. Using secondary national survey data, we illustrate Tanzanian citizens' attention to justice cues. We then test two competing hypotheses about the impact of religious identity on attention to justice cues. The first hypothesized model, based on System Justification Theory, predicts that subordinate group members (Muslims) will stay more loya…
Crossing the line of legitimacy
How Psychological Science Impedes Intersectional Thinking
Psychological science that examines racial and gender bias, primarily located within social psychology, has tended to discount the ways in which race and gender mutually construct each other. Lay conceptions of racial and gender discrimination tend to see racism as primarily afflicting men and sexism primarily afflicting White women, when in fact race and gender are interrelated and work together intersectionally. Ignoring women's experiences of …
Racial Bias in Policing
There is a shocking dearth of scientific certainty about how to assess racial bias in policing. Specifically lacking is an examination of the causal relationship between officer psychological attitudes and their interactions with minority suspects. Do officer racial attitudes lead to more racially biased police behavior? Why do we, as psychologists and scientists, know less than we should about psychological attitudes and their effects on police …
Racism leads to pushups
Ain’t I a Woman?”
The space between us
Four studies investigate the role that stereotype threat plays in producing racial distancing behavior in an anticipated conversation paradigm. It was hypothesized that the threat of appearing racist may have the ironic effect of causing Whites to distance themselves from Black conversation partners. In Study 1, participants distanced themselves more from Black partners under conditions of threat, and this distance correlated with the activation …
Not yet human
Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association influences study participants' basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice…
Not yet human
Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association influences study participants' basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice…
Seeing Black
Using police officers and undergraduates as participants, the authors investigated the influence of stereotypic associations on visual processing in 5 studies. Study 1 demonstrates that Black faces influence participants' ability to spontaneously detect degraded images of crime-relevant objects. Conversely, Studies 2-4 demonstrate that activating abstract concepts (i.e., crime and basketball) induces attentional biases toward Black male faces. Mo…
The essence of innocence
The social category "children" defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers. We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less "childlike" than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics …
The space between us
Four studies investigate the role that stereotype threat plays in producing racial distancing behavior in an anticipated conversation paradigm. It was hypothesized that the threat of appearing racist may have the ironic effect of causing Whites to distance themselves from Black conversation partners. In Study 1, participants distanced themselves more from Black partners under conditions of threat, and this distance correlated with the activation …
Ain’t I a Woman?”
Concern for the in-group and opposition to affirmative action
The present experiments suggest that the desire to benefit the in-group drives dominant-group members' policy preferences, independent of concern for out-groups' outcomes. In Experiment 1, the effect of a manipulation of affirmative action procedures on policy support was mediated by how Whites expected the policy to affect fellow Whites, but not by the expected effect on minorities. In Experiments 2 and 3, when focused on losses for the White in…
How Psychological Science Impedes Intersectional Thinking
Psychological science that examines racial and gender bias, primarily located within social psychology, has tended to discount the ways in which race and gender mutually construct each other. Lay conceptions of racial and gender discrimination tend to see racism as primarily afflicting men and sexism primarily afflicting White women, when in fact race and gender are interrelated and work together intersectionally. Ignoring women's experiences of …
Policing alienated minorities in divided cities
Minority groups frequently challenge the legitimacy of legal authorities, particularly the police. Without trust and legitimacy, the police encounter constant conflict and cannot function effectively. While past research has examined minorities’ perceptions of the police, national minorities provide an interesting and under‐investigated test case because of their inherent identity conflict with the state. The current research examines three facto…
Justice from within
Racism leads to pushups
Racial Bias in Policing
There is a shocking dearth of scientific certainty about how to assess racial bias in policing. Specifically lacking is an examination of the causal relationship between officer psychological attitudes and their interactions with minority suspects. Do officer racial attitudes lead to more racially biased police behavior? Why do we, as psychologists and scientists, know less than we should about psychological attitudes and their effects on police …
Predicting Bad Policing
Despite an increase in research relating to racial disparities in policing-particularly in the area of deadly force-there have been comparatively few attempts to theorize which factors predict disparate policing. We fill this gap by combining routine activity theory from criminology with situationist approaches to discrimination from social psychology. We propose that disparate policing is most likely to occur when officers who are vulnerable to …
Risky Situations
Swencionis & Goff identified five situations that tend to increase the likelihood that an individual police officer may behave in a racially disparate way: discretion, inexperience, salience of crime, cognitive demand, and identity threat. This article applies their framework to the realities of police work, identifying situations and assignments in which these factors are likely to influence officers’ behavior. These insights may identify opport…
The psychological science of racial bias and policing
Implications of research staff demographics for psychological science
Long-standing research traditions in psychology have established the fundamental impact of social categories, such as race and gender, on people's perceptions of themselves and others, as well as on general human cognition and behavior. However, there is a general tendency to ignore research staff demographics (e.g., researchers' race and gender) in research development and research reports. Variation in research staff demographics can exert syst…
Toward a Psychological Science of Abolition Democracy
We call for psychologists to expand their thinking on fair and just public safety by engaging with the “Abolition Democracy” framework that W. E. B. Du Bois articulated as the need to dissolve slavery while simultaneously taking affirmative steps to rid its toxic consequences from the body politic. Because the legacies of slavery continue to produce disparities in public safety in the United States, both harming Black people and the institutions …
Perspectives on Policing
The Editorial Committee of the Annual Review of Criminology has launched a new section within the journal in which we invite one or more authors to write a more personal and yet scholarly article that puts forth their perspective on an important and timely topic. For Volume 4, we asked Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff and Dr. Cynthia Lum to provide their perspectives on policing. We hope our readers enjoy this new and exciting series of “Perspectives.”
A Taste for Justice
This article examines attention to justice cues in the novel context of the nascent democracy of Tanzania. Using secondary national survey data, we illustrate Tanzanian citizens' attention to justice cues. We then test two competing hypotheses about the impact of religious identity on attention to justice cues. The first hypothesized model, based on System Justification Theory, predicts that subordinate group members (Muslims) will stay more loya…
Crossing the line of legitimacy
Seeing Black
Using police officers and undergraduates as participants, the authors investigated the influence of stereotypic associations on visual processing in 5 studies. Study 1 demonstrates that Black faces influence participants' ability to spontaneously detect degraded images of crime-relevant objects. Conversely, Studies 2-4 demonstrate that activating abstract concepts (i.e., crime and basketball) induces attentional biases toward Black male faces. Mo…
Concern for the in-group and opposition to affirmative action
The present experiments suggest that the desire to benefit the in-group drives dominant-group members' policy preferences, independent of concern for out-groups' outcomes. In Experiment 1, the effect of a manipulation of affirmative action procedures on policy support was mediated by how Whites expected the policy to affect fellow Whites, but not by the expected effect on minorities. In Experiments 2 and 3, when focused on losses for the White in…
Ain’t I a Woman?”
The space between us
Four studies investigate the role that stereotype threat plays in producing racial distancing behavior in an anticipated conversation paradigm. It was hypothesized that the threat of appearing racist may have the ironic effect of causing Whites to distance themselves from Black conversation partners. In Study 1, participants distanced themselves more from Black partners under conditions of threat, and this distance correlated with the activation …
Not yet human
Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association influences study participants' basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice…
Racial Bias in Policing
There is a shocking dearth of scientific certainty about how to assess racial bias in policing. Specifically lacking is an examination of the causal relationship between officer psychological attitudes and their interactions with minority suspects. Do officer racial attitudes lead to more racially biased police behavior? Why do we, as psychologists and scientists, know less than we should about psychological attitudes and their effects on police …
Racism leads to pushups
(The Need for) A Model of Translational Mind Science Justice Research
Despite the historical importance of translational research to social psychological investigations of social justice issues, the culture and incentives of contemporary social psychology are ambivalent towards non-experimental field research. This ambivalence poses a significant impediment to social psychology’s role in societal change. This paper offers a brief history of how the field evolved from a relative emphasis on translating social psycho…
A Taste for Justice
This article examines attention to justice cues in the novel context of the nascent democracy of Tanzania. Using secondary national survey data, we illustrate Tanzanian citizens' attention to justice cues. We then test two competing hypotheses about the impact of religious identity on attention to justice cues. The first hypothesized model, based on System Justification Theory, predicts that subordinate group members (Muslims) will stay more loya…
Crossing the line of legitimacy
How Psychological Science Impedes Intersectional Thinking
Psychological science that examines racial and gender bias, primarily located within social psychology, has tended to discount the ways in which race and gender mutually construct each other. Lay conceptions of racial and gender discrimination tend to see racism as primarily afflicting men and sexism primarily afflicting White women, when in fact race and gender are interrelated and work together intersectionally. Ignoring women's experiences of …
The essence of innocence
The social category "children" defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers. We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less "childlike" than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics …
The Impact of Psychological Science on Policing in the United States
The May 2015 release of the report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing highlighted a fundamental change in the issues dominating discussions about policing in America. That change has moved discussions away from a focus on what is legal or effective in crime control and toward a concern for how the actions of the police influence public trust and confidence in the police. This shift in discourse has been motivated by two factor…
Protecting Whiteness
Focusing on intergroup anti-non-White bias in the criminal justice system, little attention is given to how Whites may additionally be protected from negative police treatment. This study examines intragroup bias via perceived suspect phenotypic racial stereotypicality (e.g., how strongly members possess physical features typical of their racial group) on severity of police use of force. It is hypothesized that the Whiter one appears, the more th…
Justice from within
The psychological science of racial bias and policing
Implications of research staff demographics for psychological science
Long-standing research traditions in psychology have established the fundamental impact of social categories, such as race and gender, on people's perceptions of themselves and others, as well as on general human cognition and behavior. However, there is a general tendency to ignore research staff demographics (e.g., researchers' race and gender) in research development and research reports. Variation in research staff demographics can exert syst…
The criminogenic and psychological effects of police stops on adolescent black and Latino boys
Significance Four waves of longitudinal survey data demonstrate that contact with law enforcement predicts increases in black and Latino adolescents’ self-reported criminal behaviors 6, 12, and 18 months later. These results are partially mediated by psychological distress. The younger boys are when stopped for the first time, the stronger these relationships. Boys’ race and prior engagement in delinquent behaviors did not moderate the effect. Th…
On creating ethical, productive, and durable research partnerships with police officers and their departments
Translational policing science must begin with explicitly communicated research aims and a shared vision for promoting safety. For researchers to approach police departments without first considering the concerns held by officers and their departments at large, is unethical, unproductive, and undermines efforts to secure longstanding mutually useful researcher-practitioner partnerships. In presenting a case study analysis of the multi-method Nati…
Bodycams and Gender Equity
Law enforcement agencies, community advocates and policymakers hope that the widespread adoption of police bodycams will alleviate racial disparities and reduce misconduct and use of force. Racial justice has been central to this conversation, but gender justice has not. This essay takes an intersectional, gendered look at bodycam policies, challenging the assumption that officers will act more fairly when they know they are being recorded. Bodyc…
Perspectives on Policing
The Editorial Committee of the Annual Review of Criminology has launched a new section within the journal in which we invite one or more authors to write a more personal and yet scholarly article that puts forth their perspective on an important and timely topic. For Volume 4, we asked Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff and Dr. Cynthia Lum to provide their perspectives on policing. We hope our readers enjoy this new and exciting series of “Perspectives.”
Risky Situations
Swencionis & Goff identified five situations that tend to increase the likelihood that an individual police officer may behave in a racially disparate way: discretion, inexperience, salience of crime, cognitive demand, and identity threat. This article applies their framework to the realities of police work, identifying situations and assignments in which these factors are likely to influence officers’ behavior. These insights may identify opport…
Policing alienated minorities in divided cities
Minority groups frequently challenge the legitimacy of legal authorities, particularly the police. Without trust and legitimacy, the police encounter constant conflict and cannot function effectively. While past research has examined minorities’ perceptions of the police, national minorities provide an interesting and under‐investigated test case because of their inherent identity conflict with the state. The current research examines three facto…
Predicting Bad Policing
Despite an increase in research relating to racial disparities in policing-particularly in the area of deadly force-there have been comparatively few attempts to theorize which factors predict disparate policing. We fill this gap by combining routine activity theory from criminology with situationist approaches to discrimination from social psychology. We propose that disparate policing is most likely to occur when officers who are vulnerable to …
Measuring Racial Disparities in Police Use of Force
Psychology (23 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (19 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Criminology (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Policing Practices and Perceptions (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (11 works) · Social Psychology (10 works)