Almost thrown off the plane for... doing math

[dfbdfb]

The difficulty–not necessarily a problem, though it could be–with “see something, say something” initiatives is that they tend to have very poor specificity, and you get a lot of “false positives.” On the other hand, the benefit of catching “true positives” is high, so over-reporting is often encouraged.

Has anyone actually run any studies to determine whether this sort of overreporting, and thus false positives, by untrained individuals actually does lead to an increased chance of true positives?

One might logically expect that, but untrained individuals wouldn’t necessarily know what one should really look for, and thus be ignoring the stuff that would lead to true positives.