![]() In places around the world, there is a war at different periods of time in history. Though each war is different, there is one common topic that goes around in all wars: friendly fire. Friendly fire is the accidental shooting of one’s solider such as during a battle or during lookout in the nighttime. So why does friendly fire occur? Why might soldiers mistakenly fire on their own soldiers? Well, in the study of psychology there is an accurate answer to that. Friendly fire can be analyzed using signal detection analysis. This is a technique used to determine the ability of the perceiver to separate true signals from background signals. Based on the picture, there four possible outcomes to detect if your signal was accurate: a hit, a miss, a false alarm, or a correct rejection. The spots a person would want to receive is and a hit and a correct rejection because it is a correct response whether the stimulus is present or absent. Based on a specific experiment one chooses to experiment on, such as friendly fire during war, it creates two measures: sensitivity and response bias. People with sensitivity refers to “the true ability of the individual to detect the presence or absence of signals,” much like people who have better hearing or eyesight than people who have a lack of these senses. Another measure is the response bias which is a behavioral tendency to respond “yes” to the trials. In the examples of friendly fire, when a soldier has to look keep watch for any potential threats: one must have a good reflexes or good sense of their surroundings to make the right call of when to shoot. However, depending on the person’s psychological state, one can fluctuate their response bias whether or not to make the right move. When a person is uneasy, they might adopt a lenient response bias. Whether or not this is accurate, your brain still delivers a warning signal. As a result, this can be a good or bad result, which in turn can save or lose lives in war.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorHello. Welcome to all things psychology. Enjoy! Archives
December 2017
Categories
All
|