Weapon Focus Effect
Updated 2026-08-13
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
The weapon focus effect describes the finding that witnesses to an armed crime attend automatically to the weapon and consequently encode less information about the perpetrator's face, clothing, and surroundings. The core proposition is that under threat, attention narrows onto the source of danger, so peripheral information is not encoded and cannot be recalled later. The key qualification is that the narrowing is attentional rather than motivational: witnesses are not choosing to ignore the surroundings, and the resulting memory gaps are not evidence of dishonesty.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Narrowing detection: notice when your attention has locked onto a single threatening element. - Deliberate scan: force a sweep of the surrounding context even under pressure. - Post-event reconstruction: fill in what was missed afterward rather than trusting the narrowed record alone.
Anchor fast decisions
Threat captures attention because danger demands immediate processing, which consumes the capacity available for everything else in the scene. Encoding of the unattended material fails at the point of perception, so no amount of later effort recovers it. The memory that remains is therefore accurate about the threat and unreliable about everything else.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_focusverified
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