Fear, stress, fatigue, and ambiguity erode officers’ bias-override capacity

Evidence

Because of police officers’ use of force training, they have the expertise and experience to exert cognitive control and override the dominant response and the psychological tendency to “shoot” (Correll et al., 2007). That said, certain factors make it more difficult to exert this type of cognitive control. These factors include fear, stress, fatigue, and ambiguity (Correll et al., 2014; Lambert, Payne, Jacoby, Shaffer, Chasteen, & Khan, 2003; Stepanikova, 2012), all of which set the laboratory simulation apart from the real-life situations officers face. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 409

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the noise literature’s finding that cognitive load and stress degrade controlled processing — same underlying mechanism across domains. — connects to: Vague, ever-reviewable assessment criteria generate functional anxiety in workers. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1660; Decisions made under time pressure compound stress from feared retrospective judgment — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 271; Performance-measure bureaucracies deliberately spread anxiety to erode professional autonomy — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2215