Originally published: . Volume 11, No. 5. Source pages: 9, 10.
LSU Drs. Harman & Zhang Review Advancements in Police Decision-Making for Special Issue of Frontiers in Psychology
Dr. Jason Harman and Dr. Don Zhang, assistant professors at Louisiana State University in industrial organizational psychology, recently co-authored a paper with colleague Steven Greening for a special issue of Frontiers in Psychology. The comprehensive issue covered "De-escalating Threat: The Psychophysiology of Police Decision Making."
Harman, Zhang and Greening contributed with a review of research in dynamic decision-making and how it could be applied to improve policy & training for police officers, and titled "Basic Processes in Dynamic Decision Making: How Experimental Findings About Risk, Uncertainty, and Emotion Can Contribute to Police Decision Making."
The authors looked at basic findings from experimental studies in judgment and decision-making and how these can help trainers and policy makers to improve police work. "Traditional judgment and decision-making research has focused on simple choices between hypothetical gambles, which has been criticized for its lack of generalizability to real world contexts," the authors note.
However, the more recent focus, the last 15 years, has allowed more generalizing from research to applications. The authors cover three dynamic decision-making topics in their review: 1) dynamic accumulation of evidence in the decision to shoot or not shoot; 2) how previous decisions influence current choices; and 3) how the cognitive and neurological processing of fear influences decisions and decision errors.
The Times asked Dr. Harman how he and his co-authors decided on this topic. "Bit of a story actually," he said. "Back in 2017 the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services tasked a group of researchers at the University of Toronto to replace the current police Use of Force Model with an expanded Critical Decision-Making (CDM) Model. As part of that effort, they traveled the U.S. and Canada to interview some of the leading experts on the cognitive mechanisms driving critical decision making. That led them to Louisiana to interview me for an afternoon. After our talk, the lead investigator (Judith Anderson) invited me to write up a contribution to the special issue she was organizing on police decision making covering many parts of what we had discussed," he said.
"Here at LSU, I had the perfect collaborators––Dr. Zhang (who as an undergrad at Michigan State University ran some of the key studies we reviewed in our paper) & Dr. Greening (an expert in the neurocognitive mechanisms involved in adapting to and controlling the influence of emotional events on the brain and behavior) to provide a comprehensive review of the basic research in dynamic decision making relevant to police decision making."
What were the main issues he and his co-authors found that could help police officers make better decisions?
"Our paper was really targeted towards applied researchers," he said. "Thirty years ago or so, research relevant to police decision making split into basic research (in a lab trying to determine the precise cognitive mechanisms of decision making) and applied research (studying experts in the field making real-world/real-time decisions). The two methods rarely informed each other, as lab studies lacked the environmental complexity necessary to understand and effect high stakes immediate decisions. Our paper highlights some of the advances that laboratory decision science has made in the past 15 years that make results from basic decision science more applicable to applied research," he explained.
"We highlight, for example, that there is a growing body of evidence from the lab that experienced outcomes (either real or imagined) and especially the frequency of experienced outcomes will have a much larger influence on decisions than descriptive information, such as guidelines or warnings," he said.
"One of the possible implications of this research is that the extensive training on the rare dangerous interaction could lead to biased responses in normal circumstances (expecting a dangerous situation when one shouldn't). One possible remedy would be increased experiential training on routine interactions," he said. "Again, and this is important, this suggestion would need to be tested in a realistic environment as the complexity of policy decision making is such that multiple factors interact beyond just these basic cognitive processes." Does the group plan on a follow-up review or research?
"I have a colleague in Virginia currently using Virtual Reality training as a possible inoculation to PTSD for military medics and we are currently discussing using VR to test some of the training suggestions above."
The work is available at Front. Psychol., 20 September 2019 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02140
Dr. Jason Harman earned his doctorate from Ohio University and then followed with his work as a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon in the Social and Decision Sciences Department, working with Dr. Cleotilde Gonzalez in the Dynamic Decision Making Lab. Dr. Harman has published in decision science including research with Dr. Gonzales on choice consistency, rare events, evaluation and health decisions. His research areas include dynamic decision making, cognitive models, goal pursuit, and Applied Decision Science. He is the principal investigator for a study of decision making in those saving and retiring. He has presented his work in the UK, Hungary, Poland, Germany and Canada, as well as around the US.
Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on data visualization, specifically communicating validity information to relevant stakeholders. His research involves the application of psychological principles to the workplace. He is also interested in the individual differences in risk taking propensity and the relations to life and work outcomes such as job performance, counter productivity, and safety compliance. His work has been published in various international journals and books.
He received his PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Bowling Green State University. He works closely with organizations to create evidence-based plans and deliver solutions that are tailored to their unique needs.
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