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.
Highlights
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)
The analyses are split into two sections that coincide with the two aims: replicating the gun embodiment effect and determining whether individual differences moderate the effect
B′′ provides a nonparametric measure of bias, which refers to the tendency to report that a gun is present
Summary
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 Another factor informing the decision to shoot is whether the person making the decision to shoot is wielding a gun (Witt and Brockmole 2012).
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