Open Carry

Last week, in connection of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, I posted research showing that people are more likely to “see” a gun in the hands of a African-American man than a white man, even when that black man is carrying a harmless object such as a cell phone. Now I've found a new series of studies that suggest that carrying a gun also increases the likelihood that you will see a similar weapon in the hands of others.

Photo by itwuzcryptic

In a soon-to-be-published paper, Jessica Witt and James Brockmole of Notre Dame University report five studies in which they asked student participants to look at slides of men carrying either guns or harmless objects. The students had about a half-second to indicate whether the person was armed or not by raising or lowering a lever. The experiment varied the handle of that lever. In one condition, it was shaped like a realistic-looking toy handgun. It the other, it was a rubber ball. The results showed that the participants were more likely to “see” the person in the slide as holding a gun when they themselves were holding a gun than when they were holding a ball.

The authors interpret these findings as consistent with the theory of event coding. This theory is a scientific variation on the old saying that when you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When planning an action with an object or tool, you are predisposed to identify other objects on which the tool might be used.

The authors also considered the theory of conceptual priming. This theory suggests that the mere presence of a weapon in the environment predisposes people to “see” other weapons. They rule this explanation out due to one of their five experiments. In this variation, a real firearm was placed on the table while the subjects were performing the task using the lever with the rubber ball handle. There was no greater tendency to see the man in the slide as holding a firearm when a real gun was present in their environment than when it was not.

I suspect that they ruled out the priming explanation prematurely. First of all, there are other studies showing that aggressive cues in the environment affect behavior. For example, in a study by Berkowitz and LePage, frustrated participants were more likely to respond aggressively when there were weapons (a handgun and a rifle) on the table than when there was either a neutral object (a badminton racquet) or nothing on the table. Secondly, in the Witt and Brockmole study, participants were exposed to many photos of handguns, and guns were referred to when explaining the task. It's possible that in such a gun-saturated environment, the presence of yet another gun—albeit a real one—didn't make much difference.

I go into these details not only because I believe in priming—an effect supported by literally thousands of studies. It also affects the practical implications of Witt and Brockmole studies. A strict interpretation of them would state that the bias to “see” a gun occurs only when you are holding a gun in your hand.

In this country, all but eight states permit ordinary people to openly carry a firearm either on their person or in their car (although some of them require a license), and all but Illinois (and D. C.) allow people to carry concealed weapons. This research implies that carrying a firearm makes you more likely to see others as dangerous. Does it matter whether you are carrying the gun in your hand, in a holster, or in the glove compartment of your car? Probably. You are more likely to be aware of the gun when it's in your hand (as Zimmerman's apparently was). But I suspect that carrying a concealed weapon alters threat perception as well. Maybe future studies will test the limits of this effect.