If you are a seasoned adult who has been involved in any amount of training throughout your life, you have likely encountered a situation where the “good stuff” — the information or techniques that you really want — is only offered later in the “advanced class.” Of course, getting into the advanced class means investing more time and more money.
There are valid reasons for certain ideas or methodologies being held back for more advanced students. Going back to high school, you took Algebra 1, then Geometry, and then Algebra 2. If you were an advanced thinker, you took Trigonometry and then Calculus. A person who never took Algebra or Geometry would be severely handicapped if they were just dropped into a Calculus class.
The Primacy Effect
The primacy effect is a cognitive bias where we’re more likely to remember and weigh the first items or information we encounter in a sequence better than those who follow. This occurs because our brains usually have more time to process initial details and transfer them into long-term memory.
Whether you knew what it was called or not, you have very likely encountered this in your life. How many of you who have taken multiple training classes remember more about your first class than the third or fourth, etc? When a topic is brand new, your brain is engaged…it’s taking in everything that’s presented as best it can. You are drinking from a firehose.
Firearms Training and the Primacy Effect
It’s been a while, but I once had a conversation with a firearms trainer and inquired about a certain method or technique that was absent in the class. By my way of thinking, the method in question was foundational. However, the trainer explained to me, “We don’t teach that to beginners, that’s for more advanced students. If they want that, they need to come back.”
Such is the conundrum of training, particularly martial firearms training, that of determining what information, techniques and skills should be taught during initial courses. There are genuine reasons why certain physical techniques are reserved for later. For instance, we don’t teach off-hand only reloading techniques to students during the first class.
Regardless, we must be absolutely cognizant of the primacy effect when we prepare a curriculum and demonstrate techniques for our students. We must consider which skills or methods are foundational.
As an example, the method we teach for loading a handgun is foundational because that set of motions isn’t just for initial loading, it is for reloading, and clearing basic stoppages. We don’t begin the training day with stoppage clearing. However, by the time we get to that part, the physical movements necessary are already a built-in habit for the student. All of the drills in our P201 Martial Application of the Pistol course build upon previous drills.
Naturally, we only have so much time in the day and so many hours in which to teach. This is when we examine our goals. What are the terminal learning objectives? That is, what must every student know and understand before they leave the class? This is where primacy comes into effect. What type of foundation are we laying?
Conflicting Information: Expecting Students to Forget
There is another extremely important reason for all instructors and trainers to be intimately familiar with the definition of the primacy effect and how physical skills are developed and then stored in the basal ganglia for future reference. Amongst other things, the basal ganglia aids in the development of neuromuscular pathways (what we used to call “muscle memory”).
When a student is brand new to a subject, such as martial application of firearms, they do not yet have the physical habits or neuromuscular pathways established for the operation and employment of firearms. That is why they come to us, to learn those and develop the skill. In our effort to move a student from a condition of conscious incompetence to unconscious competence, we explain, and demonstrate, and then coach them through the process until the movements become natural and then eventually instinctive. Our goal is for certain movements to become reflexive and natural, not requiring a deliberate, time consuming thought process.
The operation of a manual safety on a pistol or rifle is a great example. When students first begin, they are frustrated when the trigger does not move because they forgot to take off the safety. By the end of the first day, that frustration should be gone as operating the safety becomes natural and instinctive after dozens and then hundreds of repetitions.
Nonetheless, we witness certain training programs that teach what they call “administrative” actions, things that are not tactical or used during an actual fight. There are varied reasons for this, regardless, students are forced to learn methods or skills that they are expected to forget or disregard later. “We don’t press check during a gunfight!” one instructor said while yelling at a student who stopped to press check after reloading his pistol in the middle of a shooting drill.
Why did the student, mid-drill, knowing that he needed to get more ammo into the gun and finish the fight pause to conduct a press check? Easy, he was taught to do so during the first hour of the first day of training and then reminded continuously to do so. The fact that a student would pause during an active drill do perform that motion is the primacy effect on full display. Under the hurried stress of the live-fire drill, the students brain returns to what was implanted in it and what came first.
The idea that a student should be taught a skill or physical method initially, during their first class, but then be expected to disregard that later, when we change the rules, is absolute sophistry. Such is amateurish and not at all the mark of a skilled educator.
We witness this primacy behavior in children all the time. Kids learn from watching their parents. When a child engages in a behavior that they have witnessed a parent doing, we cannot blame them. They are only doing what they first learned to do.
Self-Taught Shooters
Another big issue for small arms and tactics instructors is the “self-taught shooter.” That is the guy who didn’t want to “look bad” when they got to the class, so they went out and practiced on their own prior to attending training.
Now, present in the class, we tell them and show them what we need them to do, but they have built up what we call “training scars.” They practiced doing something incorrectly hundreds of times. Even if they have a sincere desire to perform as we have demonstrated for them, it is difficult to do so. Why? The primacy effect of performing an action hundreds of times incorrectly is what has been built into their neuromuscular pathways.
That is the reason we strongly discourage men from attempting to go out and practice or train themselves before they attend actual training. Simply put, if you have performed an action 500 times incorrectly, you are going to have to do it correctly 501 times, before you can begin to learn to do it right.
The primacy effect is very real and a strong driver. All dedicated educators, as well as students, need to understand it and how it can work for them, not against them.
Paul G. Markel is a combat decorated United States Marine veteran. He is also the founder of Student of the Gun University and has been teaching Small Arms & Tactics to military personnel, police officers, and citizens for over three decades.