Immersive simulations with extreme teams

Extreme teams (ETs) work in challenging, high pressured contexts, where poor performance can have severe consequences. These teams must coordinate their skill sets, align their goals, and develop shared awareness, all under stressful conditions. How best to research these teams poses unique challenges as researchers seek to provide applied recommendations while conducting rigorous research to test how teamwork models work in practice. In this article, we identify immersive simulations as one solution to this, outlining their advantages over existing methodologies and suggesting how researchers can best make use of recent advances in technology and analytical techniques when designing simulation studies. We conclude that immersive simulations are key to ensuring ecological validity and empirically reliable research with ETs

Building an International Network: International Academic Partnerships for Science and Security

Slides for the presentation presented at the ENVISION24 Conference Session 8: Lighting Talks: Transformative Workforce Developmen

Utilising motion capture technology to identify trusted testimony in military encounters

Objectives:We use motion capture technology to examine whether or not soldiers unconsciously act differently toward untrustworthy interlocutors.Design:Participants interviewed six ‘citizens’ (confederates) about an illegal activity on a military base. We varied citizen trustworthiness by cooperativeness (either cooperative or non-cooperative) and knowledge (either genuine, absent, or false). Methods:Forty University students wore an Xsens motion capture suit while interviewing the citizens, after which they made explicit trust judgments. Movement data were submitted to a linear mixed effects model with cooperation and knowledge as repeated measures, and interview order as a random effect. Results:Greater overall body movement differentiated non-cooperative citizens from their counterparts, F(1, 1363.5) = 33.86, p < .001, and citizens with no knowledge from those with knowledge, F(1, 1363.1) = 3.01, p < .05. Participants’ explicit judgements only identified those who were uncooperative. Conclusions:Interviewers could not judge whether an uncooperative citizen had valuable information, yet they reacted differently to those with valuable knowledge. Thus, using small-scale motion tracking sensors enables interviewers to identify uncooperative citizens concealing valuable information from other innocent, though not necessarily cooperative, citizens. Furthermore, monitoring nonverbal behaviour may be more effective at identifying threat than explicit judgments that rely on conscious awareness

Hiding in Plain Site: A Turing Test on Fake Persona Spotting

This research investigated the ability of humans to accurately detect fake Facebook profiles. The prevalence of fake profiles on social media provides a consistent threat to users from malicious actors and computer-generated identities. This study wanted to move away from software and algorithm focused attempts to counter these threats and instead put the emphasis on the individual and their ability to detect a fake profile. Participants were shown a series of fake Facebook profiles (created specifically for this research) and real Facebook profiles and tasked with judging the authenticity of said profiles. Participants were also asked to identify the areas of the profile they had used to make their decision using heatmap software. Across the six studies within this research, new experimental manipulations were introduced each time in the form of time pressure, cross-cultural profiles, and training interventions. This approach allowed for investigation into the conditions that have the greatest influence over participants judgement accuracy, and also aligned the studies more closely with real world aspects of decision making in the online world. Participants were more accurate at correctly identifying real profiles as real than they were at correctly identifying fake profiles as fake, and fake profiles with a higher number of manipulated characteristics (4 Fakes) were judged more accurately than those with fewer (2 Fakes) or zero characteristics (0 Fakes). However, their judgment accuracy was often no better than that of chance. Additionally, participants in all studies relied heavily upon the visual stimuli of the profiles (manipulated characteristic Photo Type) to inform their authenticity judgements. The insights gathered from this study add to the literature around online deception, establish a foundation for future research with a person-centric approach, and inform the design of future studies exploring similar themes

Interpersonal Sensemaking and Cooperation in Investigative Interviews : The Role of Matching

Theories of interpersonal sensemaking predict that cooperation emerges in interactions where speakers are matched on motivational frames and use a cooperative rather than competitive orientation. However, while there has been correlational research supporting the positive effects of motivational frame matching, this has not been investigated experimentally. This PhD thesis provides the first evidence of a causal link between motivational frame matching and cooperation and trust in an investigative interviewing context. Five experiments found that a cooperative orientation and motivational frame matching consistently led to more positive interaction outcomes (e.g., willingness to cooperate and trust the interviewer). However, within a competitive orientation interaction, the results were mixed. When participants were not actively involved in the interaction (Chapter 3), motivational frame matching during competitive interviews led to less positive interaction outcomes and this was largely driven by the relational and identity motivational frame matching. Conversely, when participants were actively responding to the interviewer at each interview round (Chapters 4-5), motivational frame matching led to more positive interaction outcomes, regardless of the orientation. Participants round-by-round interview responses showed that interacting with a matching interviewer led to more participant reciprocal matching, and this tendency was magnified in the competitive orientation interaction. Chapter 6 moved out of the laboratory to examine authentic military investigative interviews. The communication behaviours within these interviews largely followed a cylindrical model structure, with instrumental, relational, and identity motivational frames being communicated across cooperative, competitive, and avoidant orientations, with different levels of intensity. Analyses of motivational frame matching found an interaction between confessions and the direction of matching: Interviews containing a confession saw more motivational frame matching by the suspect of the interviewer’s frames but not more matching by the interviewer of the suspect’s motivational frames; interviews where the interviewer had received interview training—compared to interviews where they had not—contained more overall motivational frame matching. In sum, the findings of this thesis suggest that motivational frame matching leads to more positive interaction outcomes and greater reciprocal matching, but that the orientation, as well the directionality of the motivational frame matching, matters for the size and direction of these positive outcomes

Culture Moderates Changes in Linguistic Self-presentation and Detail Provision when Deceiving Others

Change in our language when deceiving is attributable to differences in the affective and cognitive experience of lying compared to truth telling, yet these experiences are also subject to substantial individual differences. On the basis of previous evidence of cultural differences in self-construal and remembering, we predicted and found evidence for cultural differences in the extent to which truths and lies contained self (versus other) references and perceptual (versus social) details. Participants (N = 320) of Black African, South Asian, White European and White British ethnicity completed a catch-the-liar task in which they provided genuine and fabricated statements about either their past experiences or an opinion and counter-opinion. Across the four groups we observed a trend for using more/fewer first-person pronouns and fewer/more third-person pronouns when lying, and a trend for including more/fewer perceptual details and fewer/more social details when lying. Contrary to predicted cultural differences in emotion expression, all participants showed more positive affect and less negative affect when lying. Our findings show that liars deceive in ways that are congruent with their cultural values and norms, and that this may result in opposing changes in behaviour