The Gun That Wasn’t There

By Bob Owens

The Force Science Institute recently conducted a major study on the performance of human memory under stress.

They took 64 Canadian police officers and split them into pairs, with one officer being designated as “active” participants responding to a scenario, and the other being assigned the role of an “observational” watcher. The active officer was to work through the scenario, while the observer was to passively watch the situation.

The scenario was carefully engineered to induce high levels of stress, getting as close as possible to the levels of stress an officer might encounter in a real-life situation.

Dave Spaulding notes the details of how the scenario was carried out:

…each pair watched a two-minute “briefing video,” purported to be cell phone footage taken in a college classroom. With a class in progress, a disgruntled student enters the room and engages the professor in an argument about poor grades. The perpetrator becomes increasingly agitated, draws a knife from his pocket, and takes the professor and another student hostage, while people flee from the scene.

Then from inside the “classroom,” each officer team, “dispatched” to the location, was exposed to the “experimental scenario,” lasting about four minutes. Standing side by side in …read more

Source:: Bearing Arms