Pre-Analysis Plan: Social Media Images and Police Reputation. The Effect of Visual Primes on Perceived Effectiveness and Procedural Fairness of the Police.

Traditionally, public relations work of the police has been dependent on press releases and newspaper reports. Social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram enables the police to engage in personalized communication, citizen dialogue, and to use pictures and videos as a means of visual self-representation (Denef et al. 2013, Feltes 2002, Wood 2020). Previous research suggests that police social media communication can be an effective tool to enhance citizens’ perceived police legitimacy (e.g. Grimmelikhuijsen & Meijer 2015 for review). Visual representation of police officers, however, can also have negative effects on citizens’ evaluation of police reputation (e.g. Mummolo 2018, Grimmelikhuijsen & Meijer 2015). This study investigates how the visual representation of German police officers affects citizens’ evaluation on the effectiveness and procedural fairness of the police. Specifically, we argue that there are at least two broad stereotypical representations of policy officers; police officers as servants to the community (SC) and police officers as crime fighters (CF). We expect that representing police officers as crime fighter excerpts a positive effect on the police’s perceived effectiveness, while representing police officers as servants to the community increases the police’s perceived procedural fairness. We test these theoretical expectations by conducting an online survey experiment exposing participants to different visual primes taken from an official police social media account before asking the respondents to evaluate the effectiveness and procedural fairness of the police.

传统上，警务公关工作一直依赖新闻稿与报纸报道。诸如Twitter、Facebook及Instagram等社交媒体平台，使得警方能够开展个性化沟通、与民众展开对话，并以图片、视频作为视觉自我展示的载体（Denef等人，2013；Feltes，2002；Wood，2020）。既往研究表明，警方的社交媒体沟通可作为提升民众对警方合法性感知的有效手段（相关综述可参见Grimmelikhuijsen与Meijer，2015）。然而，警务人员的视觉形象展示也可能对民众的警方声誉评价产生负面影响（Mummolo，2018；Grimmelikhuijsen与Meijer，2015）。本研究旨在探究德国警务人员的视觉形象展示，如何影响民众对警方执法效能与程序正义的评价。具体而言，我们认为警务人员的刻板印象形象至少可分为两大类：一类是社区服务型警员（servants to the community，简称SC），另一类是打击犯罪型警员（crime fighters，简称CF）。我们假设，将警务人员塑造为打击犯罪者的形象，会对民众感知的警方执法效能产生积极影响；而将警务人员塑造为社区服务者的形象，则会提升民众感知的警方程序正义水平。为验证上述理论假设，本研究开展了一项线上调查实验：向实验参与者展示取自官方警方社交媒体账号的不同视觉启动素材，随后请受访者对警方的执法效能与程序正义进行评价。