Emotional Decision-Making: A Dual Process Approach to Understanding How Law Enforcement Officers Make Crisis Decisions

Abstract

Contemporary society is becoming increasingly complex and conflict oriented. The front-line arbiters of these conflicts are the law enforcement officer. The most basic tool they use to address and resolve these social conflicts are their reasoning and decision-making abilities. The reasoning to a conclusion in the form of a decision by law enforcement officers is not well understood outside the law enforcement profession. In this study, the decision-making processes used by 261 law enforcement officers from Florida was examined to evaluate their style of thought processing as proposed by the dual process theory and the influence of emotion and consequence on their decision-making style. The Cognitive Reflection Test was used to identify System 1 and System 2 thinkers. The Difficulty in Emotion Regulation Scale was used to evaluate participants’ emotionality and the Consideration of Future Consequence Scale was used to identify if thoughts of consequence were different between the decision-making styles. No statistically significant differences were found between decision-making styles and emotionality or thoughts of consequence. However, two covariates were found that demonstrated statistical significance: Gender and education level across System 1 and System 2 decision-making processes with participant emotionality and consequence thought. Additional results indicated the impact of higher education levels on decision-making was significant across both System 1 and System 2 thinkers’ emotionality and consequence thoughts. This information can guide law enforcement agencies in developing recruitment policies and hiring practices to attract higher-educated law enforcement officer candidates who will be better decision-makers.