Shoot First and MultitAsk Questions Later

According to an article published on PhysOrg.com, researchers Heather Kleider, Dominic Parrott, and Tricia King in the psychology department at Georgia State University conducted a study showing that police officers who score lower on measurements of working memory and who experience higher heart rates and more perspiration in stressful situations are more likely to shoot unarmed subjects. The study is to be published in an upcoming issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology.

In the study, subjects were police officers employed in urban districts. Their first task was to complete a working memory test. Then they viewed a video of a stressful situation (a police officer being killed in action) while researchers measured their heart and perspiration rates as well as other factors indicative of stress. Afterward, the officers participated in a simulation in which they viewed pictures of armed and unarmed assailants, making rapid decisions whether to shoot or not. If the assailant was armed, officers were instructed to press a "shoot" button; if unarmed, then they were to press a "don't shoot" button. Kleider et al. found that officers who exhibited poor working memory capacity and physiological indicators of stress tended to erroneously press the "shoot" button more often.

Kleider explained that "working memory is an overarching cognitive mechanism that indicates the ability to multitask" (PhysOrg, 2009, para 4). Kleider believes that the stress of controlling impulses (such as the impulse to pull the trigger of a gun) monopolizes a large portion of one's working memory. Therefore, she and her colleagues reason, officers with low working memory capacity don't have enough cognitive resources left over to simultaneously analyze a situation before pulling the trigger of their firearm.

Kleider et al.'s findings seem reasonable. I would have predicted that officers' ability to rapidly process multiple aspects of a given situation correlates with the accuracy of their decisions. One thing I wonder, however, is the degree to which training can improve the performance of the officers who shot unarmed assailants in the experiment. I suspect that it can, at least a little. I think there are at least two kinds of training that might help: First, the officers could improve their working memory performance (as I described in this post). Second, they can automatize their ability to recognize guns (as I described in this post).

Speaking of automaticity, I have a friend who is a police officer. One thing I've heard him repeat several times is that, in stressful situations that require rapid action, officers revert to their training. Based on the research I've read during the last six weeks, I believe he was saying that police training is designed to produce automaticity--being so thoroughly trained that the need to select a response is bypassed. Although the situations with which police officers must deal are highly complex and unpredictable (making it nearly impossible to automatize), I think it is reasonable to think that specific aspects--such as recognizing various guns--have the potential to be automatized.

In fact, I am reminded of a story about the training of gunners in World War II. One problem they faced was deciding whether far off planes were enemies or not. Through tachistoscopic training, the gunners learned to accurately identify tiny silhouettes of planes in as little as one-tenth of a second. After training, gunners could make as many as 2,000 correct identifications consecutively based on photos that would look like amorphous specks to untrained observers. Since the situations that WWII gunners faced closely parallel the situations police officers must face (in terms of the stress, the threat to be identified, and the decisions to be rendered), I am inclined to be optimistic that police officers can be similarly trained.