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the more time the bodyguard has to react. And the more time the bodyguard has, the better his ability to read the mind of any potential assailant. But in the Hinckley shooting, there was no white space. Hinckley was in a knot of reporters who were standing within a few feet of the President. The Secret Service agents became aware of him only when he starting firing. From the first instance when Reagan’s bodyguards realized that an attack was under way — what is known in the security business as the moment of recognition — to the point when no further harm was done was 1.8 seconds. “The Reagan attack involves heroic reactions by several people,” de Becker says. “Nonetheless, every round was still discharged by Hinckley. In other words, those reactions didn’t make one single difference, because he was too close. In the videotape you see one bodyguard. He gets a machine gun out of his briefcase and stands there. Another has his gun out, too. What are they going to shoot at? It’s over.” In those 1.8 seconds, all the bodyguards could do was fall back on their most primitive, automatic (and, in this case, useless) impulse — to draw their weapons. They had no chance at all to understand or anticipate what was happening. “When you remove time,” de Becker says, “you are 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 primed them — just like John Bargh did in the experiments described in chapter 2 — by flashing either a black face or a white face on a computer screen. Then Payne showed his subjects either a picture of a gun or a picture of a wrench. The image was on the screen for 200 milliseconds, and everyone was supposed to identify what he or she had just seen on the screen. It was an experiment inspired by the Diallo case. The results were what you might expect. If you are primed with a black face first, you’ll identify the gun as a gun a little more quickly than if you are primed with a white face first. Then Payne redid his experiment, only this time he sped it up. Instead of letting people respond at their own pace, he forced them to make a decision within 500 milliseconds — half a second. Now people began to make errors. They were quicker to call a gun a gun when they saw a black face first. But when they saw a black face first, they were also quicker to call a wrench a gun. Under time pressure, they began to behave just as people do when they are highly aroused. They stopped relying on the actual evidence of their senses and fell back on a rigid and unyielding system, a stereotype.

“When we make a split-second decision,” Payne says, “we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.” Payne has tried all kinds of techniques to reduce this bias. To try to put them on their best behavior, he told his subjects that their