How We Process Under Pressure: On Not Being a Superhero

Source: Matthew J. Sharps

In this post of the Forensic View, we continue with our series on responses to extreme stress. Some of these responses, such as the tunnel vision and “automatic pilot” behaviors we covered in our last two posts, are quite spectacular in their effects. Other aspects of the human “fight-or-flight” response, the adrenalized state in which we’re prepared to deal with emergencies but with little else, are more subtle; but these more insidious processes can also have devastating effects.

Some years ago, I spoke with a state police officer. His job was to patrol, alone in his vehicle, one of the major “drug highways” on which dangerous narcotics are smuggled into the United States. Many of the smugglers are quite dangerous too, and so approaching a suspect vehicle on this section of highway, always alone, called for extreme caution on the part of the officer. But on one occasion, caution wasn’t enough. Several men in a suspect car, covered by the doors of the car, produced firearms and were obviously about to fire on the officer.

But somehow, he said, he knew he’d be okay. Even though the situation occurred in relative darkness, he told me that he saw everything in perfect clarity, even describing aspects of the situation in the interior of the car that should have been obscured by the vehicle doors. This heightened visual clarity was accompanied, for him, by a slowing of time; the suspects seemed to be moving in slow motion, and his own motions were as fast as those of a superhero by comparison. The officer was able to draw and deploy his own weapon at what seemed to be superhuman speed. He was ultimately able to resolve the situation successfully. A modest and very religious man, he credited his superhero-level visual acuity and speed in this situation to God, and he was very strongly invested in this opinion.

With respect to religious beliefs, this specific set of beliefs can prove extremely dangerous to a first responder.

High-stress experiences are often subjective

Artwohl & Christensen (1997; see also Klinger, 2004) demonstrated quite clearly that one of the most common cognitive and perceptual phenomena encountered under high stress is a subjective sense that time has slowed down. Under the same conditions, oddly, some people may experience the opposite, a sense that time has somehow accelerated, but this is relatively rare. For most people who experience a time anomaly, the sense that everything around them is essentially moving in slow motion is the most common effect; and the great problem here is that it isn’t really happening. The bad guys may really be moving just as quickly as they always do, in real life. The perceived slowing is a subjective experience, happening only inside the mind of the observer.

The same is true for the heightened sense of visual clarity. This too is among the more common reports of persons under high stress; people may report visual powers that are literally beyond belief. I have personally encountered a number of cases in which eyewitnesses claimed to have seen things, with perfect visual clarity, that lighting conditions at the scene, or the occluding influence of objects in the way, would have rendered completely invisible. Under very high stress, our brains may produce what is effectively an illusion; we can believe not only that we’ve seen things, but that we’ve seen them with perfect visual clarity, when in fact those things were not visible at all.

It's obvious that these phenomena can be horribly problematic in the realm of eyewitness memory, as well as in the realm of emergency service. Eyewitnesses may believe that events which actually took only seconds to occur went on for several minutes (or, much more rarely, that things happened even more quickly than they actually did); and the same witnesses may believe that they’ve seen things, with perfect light and clarity, that happened, literally, in pitch darkness and behind concrete walls. Moreover, they may believe these things very firmly, with a substantial emotional investment in their stories.

Emotional investment makes one's beliefs inflexible

In previous posts of the Forensic View (e.g., 10/23/20), we’ve seen the influence of such investment: This is cognitive dissonance, the phenomenon in which greater emotional or other investment in a perspective may result in a very high valuation of that perspective on the part of the observer. Cognitive dissonance may render witnesses’ beliefs in their visual and temporal superpowers inflexible and adamantine.

The same cognitive dissonance can also render a first responder’s beliefs similarly inflexible. An emergency responder’s subjective experience of these phenomena can give him or her a comforting sense of relative invulnerability in hazardous emergency environments; a sense of invulnerability which could lead that responder to engage in actions that might lead to serious injury or death.

Training on the psychology behind high-stress situations is needed

In previous Forensic Views (see also Sharps, 2022), we have seen that effective training must reproduce the reasonable spectrum of situations that responders will encounter in the field as closely as possible; and this is also true for training to deal with expectations. It is important that original academy training for first responders, as well as periodic training throughout their careers, deal not only with concrete responses to the situations they will encounter but also with the psychology involved in those situations, with the way in which even implicit expectations, based on perceived past experience, can bias the responder against success and even survival. Prior frameworks for understanding are crucial for success, perhaps, especially in emergency situations (Sharps, 2022). If responders know what may happen to them psychologically under high-stress circumstances before it happens, they can prepare; they are in a much better position to succeed and to survive.

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This is an area in which psychologists, and emergency response commanders and trainers, can have a very real and beneficial impact. Training in the likely psychological impacts of stress can play a very real part in the success and survival of law enforcement officers, firefighters, and other emergency workers who serve in hazardous environments.