Responses to Unexpected and Ambiguous Events Involving Police Officers.

It is widely thought that perceptions of policing have become polarized along political lines following highly publicized episodes of police violence against minority victims spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter movement and associated counter-movements. Yet, little is known about how the general public interprets events involving police officers as typically reported in mass media headlines, and whether these interpretations differ by political leanings. In this paper, we use a novel experimental design informed by affect control theory to show that liberal and conservatives systematically interpret "clickbait" headlines featuring surprising or ambiguous events involving police officers in systematically different ways. Liberals are more likely than moderates to imagine police misbehaving toward victims perceived to be good, while conservatives imagine victims of police violence to be bad, and thus possibly deserving of mistreatment, even when that information is not specified. We close by outlining the theoretical and practical implication of our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]