David J. Johnson

David J. Johnson is a social-cognitive psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Michigan State University in 2016 and was a postdoctoral researcher there in 2017. His research employs computational models and secondary data analyses to study the psychological processes that underlie decisions. He has used this approach to understand decisions where law enforcement have shot unarmed civilians. His work in this area currently focuses on how several different factors—such as the race of the civilian, the context the shooting takes place in, and the dispatch information officers receive—influence the accuracy of these use of force decisions, as well as the basic cognitive processes that produce them.