In photo, Pleasantville Police Officer Aaron Hess who is presently accused of fatally shooting unarmed Black college student Danroy Henry [MORE] From [HERE] Both the police and student subjects were most likely to shoot at blacks, then Hispanics, then whites and finally, in a case of what might be called a positive bias, Asians, researchers found.

In the first study of its kind, Joshua Correll, Bernadette Park and Charles M. Judd of CU-Boulder's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Melody Sadler of San Diego State University examined how police and a group of undergraduate subjects decide whether to shoot or not to shoot "suspects" in a multi-ethnic environment.

"Most studies on the subject of stereotyping and prejudice look at two (ethnic) groups, usually in isolation. It's always one group against another group," said Correll, a CU graduate who joined the faculty in August after a stint at the University of Chicago. "But as the country becomes more ethnically diverse, it's more and more important to start thinking about how we process racial and ethnic cues in a multicultural environment," he said.

As with previous studies into the question, data were gathered from subjects playing a "first person shooter" video game, in which figures of varying ethnicity—Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic and African-American—pop up, either "armed" with a weapon or another benign object, such as a cell phone. Participants—69 CU-Boulder undergraduates and 254 police officers—had to make quick decisions as to which figures posed a "threat" and shoot them.