Decision Making by Military Students Under Severe Stress

The object of this experiment was to study how young, severely stressed, sleep-deprived military students react and make decisions when put in a situation where the targets they are ordered to fire at with live ammunition suddenly turn out to be human beings and not humanoid dummies. In this experiment, 59% of the students (1st or 2nd lieutenants) fired their weapons and 41% did not. All of the 41% who did not fire said they noticed people in the target area and therefore did not fire, but only one of them tried to warn the others to stop firing. The results of the study show that the majority of these young, severely stressed, sleep-deprived military students fired, and of those who did hold their fire, most did not warn others to do the same.

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