[ExI] The Gunslinger Effect aka Bohr's Law

[Stuart LaForge]

Apparently Hollywood westerns got something right. In a gunfight,  
there is an advantage in drawing second. This was discovered by Niels  
Bohr, of all people, and has been empirically verified numerous times.  
Neurologically, people react faster than they can initiate action  
proactively, but only for simple one-step actions. This becomes  
reversed for complex tasks or tasks where a decision needs to be made.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-010-0057-7
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Abstract
In gunfights in Western movies, the hero typically wins, even though  
the villain draws first. Niels Bohr (Gamow, The great physicists from  
Galileo to Einstein. Chapter: The law of quantum, 1988) suggested that  
this reflected a psychophysical law, rather than a dramatic conceit.  
He hypothesized that reacting is faster than acting. Welchman,  
Stanley, Schomers, Miall, and Bülthoff (Proceedings of the Royal  
Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 277, 1667–1674, 2010)  
provided empirical evidence supporting “Bohr’s law,” showing that the  
time to complete simple manual actions was shorter when reacting than  
when initiating an action. Here we probe the limits of this effect. In  
three experiments, participants performed a simple manual action,  
which could either be self-initiated or executed following an external  
visual trigger. Inter-button time was reliably faster when the action  
was externally triggered. However, the effect disappeared for the  
second step in a two-step action. Furthermore, the effect reversed  
when a choice between two actions had to be made. Reacting is faster  
than acting, but only for simple, ballistic actions.
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Stuart LaForge