When Feedback Backfires: Confronting Gender Bias Among Police Officers in India

Sofia Amaral, Kim Chaney, Victoria Kaiser, Nishith Prakash and Abhilasha Sahay

No 12717, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Police officers’ discretionary handling of gender-based violence (GBV) complaints is a critical and largely neglected barrier to justice in developing countries. We collaborate with the Madhya Pradesh Police in India, the second largest state by area, to conduct a lab-in-the-field randomized experiment with 323 officers, and study the effect of confronting officers with evidence of their own biased handling of a fictitious GBV case. We find no statistically significant average effect on any pre-specified outcome. In exploratory analysis, responses differ by officer gender. Relative to female controls, confronted female officers prioritize the victim’s statement 23 percentage points more one week later, though this estimate rests on 58 female officers. Confronted male officers move the opposite way, a backlash: they deprioritize the victim’s statement, elevate the offender’s statement, and endorse significantly fewer pro-victim descriptors for GBV victims on a computerized stereotyping task. We detect no change in attitudes toward GBV, and no increase in guilt or shame, the affective pathway through which confrontation is theorized to operate. Behavior moves without it. Baseline bias differs sharply across groups, with 28 percent of female officers and roughly half of male officers strongly biased before treatment, but gender, baseline bias, confrontation intensity, and officer age covary in our sample and cannot be separated. We read the results as immediate reactions to having one’s own biased handling made salient, not as durable de-biasing. Uniform confrontation risks adverse responses among the most biased officers, the group such interventions most need to reach.

Keywords: prejudice confrontation; gender heterogeneity; gender-based violence; police bias; backlash; stereotype reduction; lab-in-the-field experiment; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D91 J16 J45 K14 K42 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-nud
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