How unintentional cues can bias threat assessments during shoot/don't-shoot simulations

Objective: Identify whether contextual information may unintentionally alter decision-making during lethal force training. Background: Lethal force decisions inherently involve a threat assessment, where an individual learns to identify a threat and use force commensurate to the situation. This decision is ultimately subject to numerous cognitive influences, particularly during training where artificial factors may bias decision-making. Method: Participants made threat assessments for tasks that presented hostile stimuli (pointing guns) and non-hostile stimuli (holding cell phones). Experiment 1 identified issues in target design by applying scoring rings as cues to targets, whereas Experiment 2 used bullet holes to assess cues due to target reuse. Experiment 3 applied these cues equally to hostile and non-hostile stimuli to prevent a predictive relationship from forming. Results: Significant cueing effects were observed in both Experiments 1 and 2. For Experiment 3, response times were not impacted by the invalid cues as participants could no longer reliably use the cue to distinguish between hostile and non-hostile stimuli. Conclusion: Stimulus-related factors can unintentionally create predictive relationships during lethal force training. These predictive factors are problematic because they allow participants to make threat assessments during training in a way that would never be realistic in the field. Application: Modifications should be made to hostile and non-hostile targets in equal measure to avoid creating an unintentionally predictive relationship that identifies hostile targets. In practice, scoring rings and bullet holes should be added to non-hostile stimuli to better parallel hostile stimuli.