subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction.”
We don’t often think about the role of time in life-or-death
situations, perhaps because Hollywood has distorted our sense
of what happens in a violent encounter. In the movies, gun
battles are drawn-out affairs, where one cop has time to
whisper dramatically to his partner, and the villain has time to
call out a challenge, and the gunfight builds slowly to a
devastating conclusion. Just telling the story of a gun battle
makes what happened seem to have taken much longer than it
did. Listen to de Becker describe the attempted assassination a
few years ago of the president of South Korea: “The assassin
stands up, and he shoots himself in the leg. That’s how it starts.
He’s nervous out of his mind. Then he shoots at the president
and he misses. Instead he hits the president’s wife in the head.
Kills the wife. The bodyguard gets up and shoots back. He
misses. He hits an eight-year-old boy. It was a screw-up on all
sides. Everything went wrong.” How long do you think that
whole sequence took? Fifteen seconds? Twenty seconds? No,
three-point-five seconds.
I think that we become temporarily autistic also in situations
when we run out of time. The psychologist Keith Payne, for
instance, once sat people down in front of a computer and