Question: What have u found from researching about interpersonal violence

Harry Piper answered on 25 Mar 2021:

This is great and a really specific question (I love it)!
We’ve run a few studies. The first study we looked at the accuracy of threat detection using an objective measure of violence (videos are threatening if they end in violence). We stopped participants seeing the violence for ethics though!
So the first thing we looked at for this was differences between groups. We looked at police officers, a martial artists, those with street fighting experience and those without any sort of experience of threatening situations.
What we found as really interesting. The martial artists and street fighters weren’t different from the general population in their accuracy. This was really interesting because the general population under-detected threat (i.e. they said more scenarios ended in non-violence then was the actual).
However, the police were more accurate than general population in their threat detection ability but STILL underestimated threat. So in general, everyone, even trained professionals under-detect threat.
Next we looked at years of experience and age.
In the general population, as age increased, threat detection accuracy became less accurate, they detected threat in even fewer instances than before. In contrast, as police had more years of experience (and therefore got older) they became more accurate and eventually over-detected threat! This suggests that perhaps police training influences or even the actual experience increases perception of threat!!!
This is really interesting and has huge impact in what we are doing!
We have some more data now looking at cues to violence, but we’re still analysing this data!
It’s really interesting and could influence the way we train police, the decision making process and more!
I hope that answers your brilliant question 🙂