Legal Consequences
Although much of the field data indicates Black vs. White people receive more frequent guilty verdicts and harsher sentences in the legal system, recent laboratory work tends to find null results or a pro-Black effect where White rather than Black defendants receive harsher verdicts. ​
Across five studies where participants read about a suspect of a violent assault, we consistently found a pro-Black effect and this finding was not completely due to social desirability, as previous research suggests. Rather, we found perceptions of the legal system is related to the pro-Black effect. Specifically, the more one perceives the legal system as culturally inequitable (via believing there needs to be less evidence to charge and convict a Black vs. White suspect), the more one provides a more lenient verdict for the Black defendant. However, perceived legal system inequity did not significantly impact the White defendant's verdict.
These results suggest that people's attitudes toward Black individuals may become more positive. Specifically, previous work indicates people automatically associate Black individuals with criminality. If people are associating the legal system as inequitable toward Black individuals, that Black-criminal association may weaken.