Shoot or don't shoot? Why police officers are more inclined to shoot when they are anxious.

Are Those with Darker Personality Traits more Willing to Corrupt When They Feel Anxious?

This unprecedented research endeavors to investigate the relationship between dark personality traits (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) and corruption intention through the mediation of anxiety.  Based on the resource conservation theory, it is hypothesized that those higher in dark personality traits are more inclined to corrupt when they feel anxious. Having collected data...

Across the thin blue line: police officers and racial bias in the decision to shoot.

Police officers were compared with community members in terms of the speed and accuracy with which they made simulated decisions to shoot (or not shoot) Black and White targets. Both samples exhibited robust racial bias in response speed. Officers outperformed community members on a number of measures, including overall speed and accuracy. Moreover, although community respondents set the decisi...

Shoot-Look-Shoot: A Review and Extension

We consider the optimal use of information in shooting at a collection of targets, generally with the object of maximizing the average number (or value) of targets killed. The shooting problem is viewed as a Markov decision process, and the modal solution technique is stochastic dynamic programming. Information obtained about target status may or may not be perfect, and there may or may not be ...

Don't Shoot the Relative

On Dynamical Probabilities, or: How to Learn to Shoot Straight

In order to support, for example, a quantitative analysis of various algorithms, protocols etc. probabilistic features have been introduced into a number of programming languages and calculi. It is by now quite standard to define the formal semantics of (various) probabilistic languages, for example, in terms of Discrete Time Markov Chains (DTMCs). In most cases however the probabilities involv...