Year: 2022
Type: preprint
Abstract: Over the last three decades, billions of dollars have been invested in community-oriented policing approaches that are meant to promote positive interactions between officers and civilians. However, trust in law enforcement remains low. Our qualitative analysis of over 500 hours of naturalistic observations suggested this is because police officers can make civilians feel threatened even when they are not actively investigating a crime. Here we use a pre-registered field experiment (N = 232 community members interacting with police officers) to show that civilians are less threatened and report greater trust when officers add a 10-word “transparency statement” (“I'm walking around trying to get to know the community”) to the beginning of interactions communicating their benevolent intent. Corroboration of these conclusions comes from natural language processing analyses of the interaction transcripts and from ambulatory sensors that monitored community members’ sympathetic nervous system activation. Further, five online experiments isolated the conditions under which transparency statements were most impactful (total N = 2,241). This multi-method investigation highlights an under-appreciated reason why authority figures such as police so often fail to promote positive relationships with the community: a lack of transparency about the reasons for their behavior.
Source: Research Square
Authors: David Yeager, Kyle Dobson, Andrea Dittmann
Institutions: The University of Texas at Austin, Emory University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4282018913