Wielding a gun increases judgments of others as holding guns: a randomized controlled trial
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Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
Open Access
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Wielding a gun increases judgments of others as holding guns: a randomized controlled trial Jessica K. Witt1* , Jamie E. Parnes1 and Nathan L. Tenhundfeld2
Abstract The gun embodiment effect is the consequence caused by wielding a gun on judgments of whether others are also holding a gun. This effect could be responsible for real-world instances when police officers shoot an unarmed person because of the misperception that the person had a gun. The gun embodiment effect is an instance of embodied cognition for which a person’s tool-augmented body affects their judgments. The replication crisis in psychology has raised concern about embodied cognition effects in particular, and the issue of low statistical power applies to the original research on the gun embodiment effect.Thus, the first step was to conduct a high-powered replication. We found a significant gun embodiment effect in participants’ reaction times and in their proportion of correct responses, but not in signal detection measures of bias, as had been originally reported. To help prevent the gun embodiment effect from leading to fatal encounters, it would be useful to know whether individuals with certain traits are less prone to the effect and whether certain kinds of experiences help alleviate the effect. With the new and reliable measure of the gun embodiment effect, we tested for moderation by individual differences related to prior gun experience, attitudes, personality, and factors related to emotion regulation and impulsivity. Despite the variety of these measures, there was little evidence for moderation. The results were more consistent with the idea of the gun embodiment effect being a universal, fixed effect, than being a flexible, malleable effect. Keywords: Gun perception, Gun use, Perceptual biases, Personality, Individual differences Introduction The false perception that another person is holding a gun leads to fatal outcomes, such as the shooting of an unarmed victim (Hall et al. 2016). This is demonstrated in many real-world examples, such as in 1999 with Amadou Diallo, who was shot 41 times by New York City police after his wallet was misperceived as a gun (Cooper 1999), and in 2018 with Stephon Clark, who was shot 8 times in his own backyard after officers misperceived his cell phone as a gun (Robles and Del Real 2018). The false perception even extends to the young, such as Tamir Rice, 12 years old, who was playing with a pellet gun when he *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Psychology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
was shot by two police officers who perceived the toy gun to be real (McCarthy 2014). What leads to these fatal false perceptions? One contributing factor could be the influence of stereotypes on decisions to shoot, such as the race of the subject one is making a decision about (Correll et al. 2016; Kahn and Davies 2017).
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