Decision-Making Under Stress—19 Factors to Consider
When confronted by a criminal or terrorist deadly force threat, human performance experiences extreme stress, affecting the potential victim’s self-defensive cognitive, physical, and emotional ability.
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Police veteran, founder of Critical Incident Review, and use-of-force expert Jamie Borden, explains in his book, Anatomy of a Critical Incident: Navigating Controversy, the many critical factors that must be taken into consideration when evaluating police officer behavior in these highly complex encounters.
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Law enforcement officers are the book’s target audience, but the following split-second decision-making elements excerpted from the book also apply to responsibly armed self-defense citizens and church security team volunteers facing life-and-death conditions. Where the word “officer” is located in the book, it is replaced with [defender] in this excerpt:
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• Tunnel Vision — The phenomenon where a [defender] becomes narrowly, visually focused on a specific threat, potentially missing other critical elements of the situation.
• Auditory Exclusion — A temporary inability to process or encode certain sounds, often due to high stress, which can lead to missed commands or critical background noises. This is not an individual going deaf; rather just not encoding or filtering the audible stimulus, affecting the ability to recall later. The question becomes: not was the sound audible in the evidence, rather, was the sound perceived or heard by the [defender].
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COGNITIVE OVERLOAD:
• Information Processing Limitations — Difficulty in processing multiple streams of information, leading to decision fatigue.
• Decision Fatigue — The deterioration of a [defender’s] ability to make decisions after a prolonged period of stress or high-stakes engagement.
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MEMORY LIMITATIONS:
• Encoding Failures — Inability to accurately register details of the incident due to high stress, leading to gaps in memory.
• Retrieval Failures — Challenges in recalling pertinent training or protocols that were previously learned under normal conditions.
• Post-Incident Reconstruction Issues — Difficulty reconstructing the sequence of events accurately after the incident due to stress or trauma.
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PERCEPTION LIMITATIONS:
• Selective Attention — The tendency to focus on specific aspects of the environment while ignoring others, which can result in missing key details.
• Confirmation Bias — The inclination to interpret information in a way that confirms pre-existing beliefs or expectations.
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EMOTIONAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL RESPONSES:
• Fight or Flight Response — Heightened arousal that affects decision-making speed and accuracy, leading to the appearance of potentially impulsive choices.
• Stress-Induced Impairment — Cognitive, emotional, and physical performance can diminish under acute stress conditions.
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SITUATIONAL AWARENESS:
• Decreased Situational Awareness — The ability to accurately perceive and comprehend environmental cues may diminish, hindering effective responses.
• Environmental Stressors — Factors such as noise, movement, and bystanders can overwhelm a [defender’s] capacity to assess and react appropriately.
[ Read the SemperVerus article, Situational Awareness: 14 Ways to Walk Like You Drive ]
EXPERIENCE AND TRAINING:
• Skill Degradation Under Stress — High-stress scenarios can impede the execution of learned skills and techniques, particularly if infrequently practiced or unconditioned. Keeping in mind—we can train anyone to do anything—but we cannot condition them to be skilled at it—that is incumbent on the individual [defender].
• Varying Levels of Experience — [Defenders] with different levels of experience may respond differently in critical situations, leading to inconsistencies in performance.
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COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES:
• Miscommunication — Errors in verbal or non-verbal communication among [defenders] can lead to misunderstandings about the situation or response actions.
• Information Recall Errors — Difficulty retrieving or articulating necessary information can hinder mental incident reconstruction effectiveness.
[ Read the SemperVerus article, A Treasure Trove of Gun Information: The Defensive Use of Firearms Website ]
PEER AND LEADERSHIP INFLUENCE:
• Social Pressure — The presence of peers can affect a [defender’s] decision-making and willingness to act, potentially leading to conformity or indecision.
• Hierarchy and Authority — Decisions may be influenced by the expectations or directives from superiors, regardless of a [defender’s] assessment of the situation.
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Keep these human factors in mind as you regularly train for competent, responsible, and legal armed self-defense.
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