When an armed attack takes place, eyewitnesses usually focus on the weapon and ignore the appearance of the perpetrator, to the extent that they are unable to remember his or her face accurately afterwards. Many studies have showed that seeing a gun makes eyewitnesses less reliable, because they tend to focus on the weapon, rather than the face or particularities of the criminal. These studies often concluded that this is an automatic response generated by fear or surprise at the unexpected sight of the weapon (Pickel, Ross & Truelove, 2006). In their study, Pickel, Ross & Truelove (2006) investigated the psychological mechanisms that determine the emergence of this phenomenon, called ‘the gun focus effect’ and tried to answer two main research questions. First, they investigated whether eyewitnesses could control their visual fixations, so as to focus on the perpetrator, rather than the gun, after being instructed to do so by specialists during formal lectures. The second issue investigated by the researchers was the extent to which eyewitnesses could remember guns better than neutral objects to which they might be exposed. While the method used to study the gun focus effect was appropriate for the issue examined by the authors and the experiments were objectively and professionally conducted, the manner in which the experiment was administered reduced the value of the results, and did not offer clear and definite answers to the issues raised in the article.
The article is based on relevant literature and flows logically, guiding the readers towards an understanding of the issue investigated and explaining its background and relevance thoroughly. The article is based on two experiments conducted by the authors which aim to answer two main questions, namely whether eyewitnesses are affected by a gun focus effect, which stops them from noticing details about the attacker, and whether the details of the gun are memorized easier than details of a neutral object. The authors conducted 2 experiments in order to verify whether the focus on the gun is lower in the case of educated eyewitnesses, who are aware of this effect. Furthermore, the experiments were followed by several questionnaires, in which the researchers tested the memory of the participants. They used several instruments to analyze the information, the most important of which were the Activation Deactivation Adjective Check List, which assesses the transitory emotional states of the participants, and a memory test. Pickel, Ross & Truelove (2006) used statistical analysis to reach results regarding their data and to draw relevant conclusions.
Their study involved 230 participants for the first experiment and 113 participants for the second, of mixed genders but roughly the same age. Thus, while the number of participants is high enough for the results to be relevant, the demographic similarities between them may represent a flaw for the research study. For example, a young student may react differently to an armed robbery than a more experimented person whose profession may generally require attention to detail, or than an elderly person who may be too distressed to even remember training.
Apart from the lack of demographic diversity, the study was also limited due to the fact that the experiment did not imitate a real life situation successfully. Despite the fact that the researchers tried to make students believe that the situation was real, they do admit that, “the witnesses were not particularly stressed during the time that they observed the event, as shown by their moderately low AD ACL scores” (Pickel, Ross & Truelove 2006, p. 881). Of course, when a real attack takes place, the victims typically manifest high levels of anxiety, which are likely to vary depending on their life experience, psychological particularities, and the type of aggression they are subject to. For this reason, even though in the second experiment, the researchers tried to raise the level of anxiety of the participants by telling them that they would have to give a speech, it may be argued that the situations created by the authors do not resemble real-life situations, and as such, the conclusions they drew from these experiments may not be entirely correct. This is particularly true since in the first experiment, the researchers allowed the target group to guess that the intervention of the man with the gun was part of a performance, whereas in the second experiment, the researchers informed both groups about the experiment.
The implications of the hypotheses put forth by the authors were extremely interesting, and the research does advance the understanding of the psychological theory on the gun focus effect. Even though the experiments were not particularly effective in generating situations as close as possible to real life, the implications of the study are very important, and future research could explore this hypothesis further, using other types of experiments, as well qualitative research methods, such as case studies, interviews, or mixed methods.
References
Pickel, K., Ross, S. & Truelove, R (2006). Do weapons automatically capture attention? Applied Cognitive Psychology 20: 871-893.
