Twenty-one Mental Models That Can Change Policing

A Framework for Using Data and Research for Overcoming Cognitive Bias

Renée J. Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000402759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Science médico-légale

This book goes beyond other police leadership books to teach practitioners how to think about policing in a structured way that synthesizes criminological theory, statistics, research design, applied research, and what works and what doesn't in policing into Mental Models. A Mental Model is a representation of how something works. Using a Mental Model framework to simplify complex concepts, readers will take away an in-depth understanding of how cognitive biases affect our ability to understand and interpret data, what empirical research says about effective police interventions, how statistical data should be structured for management meetings, and how to evaluate interventions for efficiency and effectiveness.

While evidence-based practice is critical to advancing the police profession, it is limited in scope, and is only part of what is necessary to support sustainable change in policing. Policing requires a scientifically based framework to understand and interpret data in a way that minimizes cognitive bias to allow for better responses to complex problems. Data and research have advanced so rapidly in the last several decades that it is difficult for even the most ambitious of police leaders to keep pace. The Twenty-one Mental Models were synthesized to create a framework for any police, public, or community leader to better understand how cognitive bias contributes to misunderstanding data and gives the reader the tools to overcome those biases to better serve their communities.

The book is intended for a wide range of audiences, including law enforcement and community leaders; scholars and policy experts who specialize in policing; students of criminal justice, organizations, and management; reporters and journalists; individuals who aspire to police careers; and citizen consumers of information about policing. Anyone who is going to make decisions about their communities based on data has a responsibility to be numerate and this book Twenty-one Mental Models That Can Change Policing: A Framework For Using Data and Research For Overcoming Cognitive Bias, will help you become just that.

Part I

How We Think

Mental Model #1

System 1 and System 2

DOI: 10.4324/9780367481520-2

The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

Nate Silver

I was sitting in my office when one of my co-workers, George (names have been changed to protect the innocent), stopped by to say hi after he had finished testifying at court. Collapsing into one of my chairs, he said, “I just had the weirdest experience.” I was immediately intrigued, because this officer, a normally steely-eyed, sarcastic, unflappable veteran officer looked astonished, so I immediately asked, “What happened?” Looking a little bewildered he started to explain:

I just got done testifying in court on a gun case. When I was on the stand the district attorney asked me what happened on the traffic stop, so I explained the series of events step by step. I pulled the suspect over, he stepped out of the vehicle and as he stepped from the vehicle, a gun dropped to the ground. When I saw the gun hit the ground, I immediately ran towards the suspect and before he could reach the gun, I engaged him, and the fight was on.

I nodded, thinking to myself that sounds like a pretty typical flow of events. He continued explaining: “There was a passenger in the car. When the fight started, they got out and walked towards the front of the vehicle, but then turned and left the scene. I called for cover and we eventually got the suspect into custody.” I responded: “Well that seems pretty normal,” to which George shook his head in disbelief and replied, “No that’s not the weird part. It was the defense attorney’s follow-up questions.”

George went on:

The defense started asking me about the movements of the passenger. She asked if there was a passenger in the vehicle which I told her “Yes, there was a passenger.” And then she asked, “What did the passenger do while I was fighting with the driver?” I explained to the jury, that the passenger got out of the car walked to the front passenger side of the vehicle and then walked away. The defense attorney asked whether the passenger come back after they left. I said “No.” Then she asked, whether the passenger ever walked around to the driver side of the vehicle where the gun was, and I said “No.”

Listening to George tell his story, I could already figure out where the defense was headed; they were trying to create reasonable doubt that the gun was not the suspect’s but the passenger’s. George explained, “I told the court, ‘no—the passenger never went to the front of the vehicle’ and the defense again asked, ‘Are you sure?’ I again said no the passenger was never near the front driver side of the vehicle. At this point the defense attorney then asks the court if they can show my body-worn camera video and the judge agreed.”

George looks at me and says,

I was fine showing the jury my body-worn video because at this point I was like “Go ahead and show it because it will substantiate what I am saying.” The defense attorney starts the video so the court and I could watch it. And this is what I saw—while the fight was occurring, the passenger gets out of the vehicle, walks to the front passenger side of the car, watches the fight for a second, and walks away just like I said he did. And in my head, I am thinking, see he walks away. And then this is when it got weird, he comes back. The passenger comes back and walks over to the front of the driver side of the car near the gun and the fight. Stands there watching for a bit and then walks away again.

Looking dumbfounded, George says,

Here is the thing though, I can’t see it in my mind. It’s not there. I can see everything in my memory. I can see when he first got out. I can see when he was near the front of the passenger side of the car, but after that he is nowhere in my memory. I can visualize the whole area where the fight was occurring, so it is not that there was something blocking him from my view. I can see exactly where he is standing in the video. It is just that he’s not standing there in my memory. He is not there. I watched the whole video. The guy is there. I close my eyes and he is not. In the video he is pretty close to me and where the gun was lying during the fight, but I can’t see him in my mind. He is not in my memory, and no matter how much I try to remember, he is just not there.

He sat back, “This is the most bizarre thing that has ever happened to me. It’s so effin’ weird.” So, like most conversations I have in my life, I steered it towards research and asked George if he had to watch the “Invisible gorilla experiment” video in the academy.

The Invisible Gorilla experiment was an experiment run by Simons and Chabris published in 1999, examining the effects of inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness is failing to notice something that is a fully visible but unexpected object because your brain is otherwise occupied with another task. The study became famous for the novelty of the research and its unexpected outcome. The experimenter devised a simple test. They video-taped two teams of three people passing a basketball back and forth to each other. One team wore black shirts, and one team wore white shirts. The players were in a wide-open space in front of a bank of three elevator doors and moved about randomly while they passed the basketball. The teams would pass the ball in a specific order: player 1 to player 2 to player 3 then back to player 1. They would use bounce passes and aerial passes and moved in rhythm with the passing of the basketball. Individuals then watched the videos and were assigned to count passes; they were either assigned to count the white team passes or the black team passes and to count all the passes (easy) or only count the aerial or bounce passes (hard). The four conditions were thus:

1 white/hard,

2 white/easy,

3 black/hard,

4 black/easy.

And while the observers were watching the teams pass the basketball either a person in a gorilla suit or a woman with an umbrella would walk through the scene. This created sixteen conditions and each observer only participated in one condition. When the participants were finished with the experiment, they were asked four questions with increasing specificity, beginning with asking them if they saw anything unusual and ending with did you see a gorilla or a woman with an umbrella.

The Invisible Gorilla experiment was designed to determine if someone’s attention was focused elsewhere, would they essentially become “blind” to another stimulus. What Simons and Charis found was that 46 percent of the people participating in the study across all conditions failed to notice the gorilla or the umbrella woman. And when comparing the easy to hard condition, they found that almost 20 percent more people failed to see the gorilla or the umbrella woman, 64 percent compared to 45 percent relatively. This study found that when people were engaged in a heavy cognitive load, they had a hard time paying attention to the things around them.

Police are trained to work through high stress events by using “combat breathing” to avoid tunnel vision caused by a rush of adrenaline. The difference between tunnel vision and inattentional blindness is that adrenaline narrows the field of perception in your vision, whereas with inattentional blindness you see the entire perceptual field, but you do not “see” something within that field. This is what happened to George during his fight, it was not tunnel vision, it was inattentional blindness. His attention was on the suspect he was fighting and even though he could “see” the passenger in the beginning of the fight, after the passenger left and returned, George’s brain no longer could “see” the passenger.

Human brains are tricky. What psychologists and neuroscientists have been learning through research is that our brains do not process information the way we think we do, especially when faced with uncertainty. Humans view their life experiences as facts and their memories as correct, even though experiences like George’s and experiments like the gorilla experiment demonstrate that our brains our fallible. We think we make rational choices in life, but often our choices are influenced by our beliefs rather than logic. Our brains do not function in a rational matter. Instead of thinking we understand the world and everything that occurs within it, we must learn about how we think before making assumptions about the world we live in. Thinking about our thinking was what one psychologist named Daniel Kahneman spent his life studying.

In 1967, Dr. Daniel Kahneman was working on experiments examining the relationship between pupil dilation, cognitive workload, and perceptions well before Simons and Chabris added a gorilla to the mix. Kahneman wondered if there was an objective measure that represented the cognitive workload of the brain. He wondered if pupil dilation reflected how hard a human brain worked. Kahneman, along with Jackson Beaty, tested the idea that as a brain works harder, the pupils dilate in sync with how hard the cognitive load is. Their theory was if they had an objective measure of cognitive load then this would assist them in learning how the brain works. They found that the pupils dilate as large as possible during maximum workload and immediately constrict once the brain is finished thinking. When they confirmed that pupil dilation was an indicator of cognitive workload, they moved on to examining what the brain attends to when taking on a workload. They designed ‘add-1’ experiments. Participants were asked to listen to a string of four numbers and then add 1 to each number and verbally respond with the new number. For example, a participant would hear 4872 (4 + 1 = 5, 8 + 1 = 9, 7 + 1 = 8, 2 + 1 = 3) and they would respond 5983. Pupil size was documented by taking a photo of the pupil at a rate of one per second. Participants were then shown the letter K on a display that was only 40 cm from their eye. At the end of the test, they were asked if the letter K had appeared during any time in the trial. What they found was over the course of the 10 seconds of the test, participants almost never missed a K at the beginning or at the end of a test, but during the period where the cognitive load was the greatest, they missed the K half of the time.

Kahneman was in search of learning how we processed the world. And what he found after decades of research is that our brain generally works in two separate ways. He defined these processes in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, as System 1 and System 2—Mental Model #1. Kahneman describes them,

System 1 thinking “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” System 2 “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.”

In policing, System 1 thinking is the mental effort that is typically being activated in patrol and System 2 thinking is the prolonged mental effort that tends to occur in investigations. System 1 is our quick response system, the one that notices a speeding car and immediately goes after it or when a suspect runs and you immediately start chasing. System 2 is the system we use when we are solving a problem that requires a greater mental effort. Interviewing a suspect requires thought and planning about what questions you are going to ask, what order are you going to ask them, and determining what outcomes you are looking for from the interview.

System 1 and System 2 are relatively easy frameworks for understanding how our brain processes information. It defines how the brain processes information and informs us as to how a human will react. If you see a lion in the jungle, System 1 engages, and you run. When helping your kid with common core math, System 2 will kick in as you engage your long-term memory and recall the rules of math learned in your childhood. Your brain will restructure that knowledge into a common core framework, and then conceptualize how to explain it in a way that your child understands. This requires a big cognitive effort. I am sure that if you paused for a moment, you would be able to think of all kinds of activities that would fall under either System 1 or System 2. Here are some of Kahneman’s examples of both systems shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Kahneman’s Examples of System 1 and System 2 Thinking

System 1	System 2
Drive a car on an empty road	Park in a narrow space
Orient to the source of a sudden sound	Search memory to identify a surprising sound
Answer to 2 + 2 =	Fill out a tax form
Detect hostility in a voice	Check the validity of a complex logical argument

Here are some policing examples of System 1 and System 2 thinking shown in Table 1.2.

Table 1.2 Policing Examples of System 1 and System 2 Thinking

System 1	System 2
Unholstering a gun when feeling threatened	Examining crime data in CompStat
Driving a squad car	Driving and giving updates during a pursuit
Chasing a fleeing suspect	Interviewing the suspect once they are caught
Read someone their Miranda rights	Trying to solve a crime from physical evidence

The tricky part about System 1 and System 2 is that people often think they are engaging System 2, being logical, rationale, and using their intellect when deciding. But System 1 has a sneaky way of influencing System 2 without System 2 even knowing it. It is tricky because of the way we view ourselves. We view ourselves as rational, logical people who think through our decisions in a precise, logical manner, based on facts. In actuality, our System 1 processing works so quickly that often if something makes sense to us, we adapt it into our beliefs. If an idea is salient to System 2, we do not “fact check” the information. Think about it this way: System 2 stays in sleep mode while System 1 runs our brains. System 2 “wakes up” when complex thinking is required, but most often System 1 is just running along making sense of the world through impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings while checking in with System 2 to turn it into a belief.

Annie Duke summarizes how we view our own thought processes in her book, Thinking in Bets. She summarizes how we think we form beliefs and how we actually form beliefs.

This is how we think we form abstract beliefs: 1. We hear something; 2. We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false, only after that 3. We form our belief. It turns out, though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way: 1. We hear something; 2. We believe it to be true; 3. Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.

This is due to cognitive load. As Kahneman and others have shown, when we are overloaded cognitively, we shut down and stop processing information. George’s story at the beginning of the book was an example of this in practice. As we process more information, our pupils dilate, our heart rate increases, and it requires more effort to critically think through something. As a species, we do not have time for the inefficiencies of System 2. We have System 1 to help us navigate the world. You cannot sit at a stop sign processing every bit of information in the world. If you did, it would take you ten minutes to put your foot down on the gas pedal. It is simpler to rely on our intrinsic responses. System 1 jumps in with a model of how we should perceive the world and, voila, beliefs are transferred from hearing something to believing something. And once System 1 decides something is true, all the information in the world that System 2 receives will now be viewed through the lens of System 1 and its biases. System 1 is an efficient system but depending on the situation it may not be an effective one.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, all kinds of information was being put out on Facebook and Twitter about what was true and what was not. One video that went viral was of a Dr. Frank Hahnel, who was advising people to take quinine and if they could not find it, then he advised people to drink three to four ounces of tonic water a day to get quinine and zinc into their system as a way to prevent COVID-19. He claimed a “friend” of his who was a doctor was successfully treating COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine and zinc. He used this information as evidence of how to prevent COVID-19. He made the claim that quinine “acts similar to hydroxychloroquine as a transport chain to let nutrients into the ce...