Junk science
. . . a new study raises an intriguing question: Could the watch captain have been fooled into thinking the youth was armed in part because he himself was holding a gun?
In the study, volunteers who held a toy gun and glimpsed fleeting images of people holding an object were biased toward thinking the object was a gun.
Here’s the “study”.
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:21 pm
What part of the study are you calling “BS”?
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:26 pm
Like most social science studies, it’s a weak methodology to measure a ridiculous assertion.
March 22nd, 2012 at 1:55 pm
Using photos of a man looking distinctly like a mugger, dressed all in black with a black hood over his head and wearing dark glasses, to hold the shoe or the gun towards the testee certainly biases the test in favor of an immediate “DANGER” reaction.
Other than that, who could call it biased?
March 22nd, 2012 at 3:42 pm
Here’s a better question. Could an adamant belief that no non-government employees should be allowed to carry a gun lead a person to believe that no criminals will carry a gun?
Does not carrying a gun lead a person to imagine that no one else is either?
March 22nd, 2012 at 7:31 pm
Well, aside from the issue of social science studies’ validity, the five parts appear, on the face of it, designed to separate the situation into discrete sections, attempting to isolate confounding factors, such as. It appears that only experiments 2 and 5 had the “mugger” (“. . . Experiments 1 and 3 depicted people holding objects off to one side. . .”) Even so, how is it a biased test? The common factor appears to be the actual holding of a gun, which is what they were trying to isolate.
Why is it unreasonable to think that actually holding a gun, having it in play, might influence someone’s perceptions?
March 23rd, 2012 at 8:30 am
That’s not unreasonable. However, a study saying that someone with a gun sees guns (which is the implication) isn’t.
March 23rd, 2012 at 11:24 am
The study says that a gun holder is more likely to see a gun when there is not one, not that they will always see a gun (if that is your point; if not, then I am unclear on what it is). (The conclusion implies that whatever object is being held causes a bias to perceive that object).