Findings demonstrate how, when faced with this ambiguity, officers rely on and revert to the simplicity of the binary

The abstract (article is not public, and available divulgation is more shocking than the abstract) substantially says that "the officers in the study were found to dumb themselves down purpusefully because a dumb world model is cognitively more comfortable (nuances are costly)".

And all of that without a hint of proportional reaction to the idea.

Another instance of the "failure of the HR".