If you’re black in the United States, you’re more than twice as likely as a white person to be unarmed if you’re killed in an encounter with the police. Why? Some kind of racial profiling is at work, but the precise psychological mechanism is poorly understood. Investigations into police shootings show that the officers often perceive cellphones and other non-threatening objects as weapons in the hands of a person of color. （66）
The classic psychological account would ascribe these mistakes to a failure of executive control, provoked by some external stimulus. （67） Seeing a black face might automatically activate the stereotype that black men are more dangerous, leading to activity in brain areas implicated in fear responses. （68） Yet the tensions between automatic and control processes are not always readily resolved, and result in errors.
（69） Researchers of “embodied cognition” focus instead on the brain’s interdependence on physiological processes that allow an organism to sustain itself. From this point of view, the mind must be understood as embedded in a body, and the body as embedded in a physical, social and cultural environment. Reality is not simply out there for the taking, but is summoned via the constant fluctuations of our own organic matter. As the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in Phenomenology of Perception （1945）: “The body is our general medium for having a world.”
Among neuroscientists, it’s increasingly popular to think of the brain not as a passive organ that receives and reacts to stimuli, but as more of an inference machine: something that actively strives to predict what’s out there and what’s going to happen, maximizing the chances of staying alive. But the body isn’t simply controlled top-down. （70） Imagine you hear a door slamming: you’re more likely to picture an intruder if you’re watching a scary movie than if you’re listening to soothing music.
A. You make that prediction because it accounts for your fast heart-rate and the sound of the door.
B. But this automatic response, which could trigger a fight-or-flight reaction, should be suppressed when the fear is irrational.
C. That is, the problem comes from the brain’s inability to resolve the conflict between an automatically activated stereotype, and a consciously held egalitarian belief.
D. New strands of work in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy of mind challenge this brain-centric orthodoxy.
E. So do police officers misinterpret what they see, or are they actually seeing a gun where there is none?
F. Rather, its signals are constantly combining with the brain’s inferences to generate our perception of the world.
