Thinking or Feeling?: Effects of Decision Making Personality in Conflict Resolution

<p>This chapter presents an investigation of the effects of decision making personality in solving an international conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is represented in a realistic and well-known videogame, PeaceMaker. Participants in a study played the game, attempting to achieve a two-state solution in the game, under the Israeli role and the Palestinian role of the game. We collected data from their game play and used a questionnaire to collect information regarding the player's personality, their religion, and other general information. Results indicate that the players' decision making personality is related to their performance in PeaceMaker. Players of thinking personality were more successful at reaching a conflict resolution in the game compared to the players with feeling personality, suggesting that those that are more assertive and impersonal, rather than affective and personal, are more successful in conflict resolution. Furthermore, this distinction is particularly important when the players' religions are those involved in the conflict.</p

Naturalistic Decision Framing in Computer Mediated Scientific Exploration

Motivation - This study was conducted to determine how people frame decisions naturally. Research Approach - Decision framing was analyzed in the computer mediated Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission planning process. Outcomes of proposed actions were coded as positively or negatively framed, with rates of framing compared relative to action specificity and expertise. Findings - It was found that positive framing was preferred in general, and that increased expertise led to more balanced consideration of positive and negative outcomes. Research Limitations/Implications - This study was exploratory and experimentation is necessary to formalize the observed patterns further. Originality/Value - The findings suggest that providing decision-makers additional information about the costs of using technology may more rapidly lead to better mental representations in technology-supported decisionmaking. Take away message - Different kinds of expert behavior promote different patterns of decision framing relative to how technology is used for decision-making

"I Don't Know What's Going on There": The Use of Spatial Transformations to Deal With and Resolve Uncertainty in Complex Visualizations

Chapter in: Thinking With Dat

Learning to Stand in the Other's Shoes : A Computer Video Game Experience of the Israeli -Palestinian Conflict

We examined the role of experience, religion, and political affiliation in learning to resolve a conflict through the video game, PeaceMaker, which simulates the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by modeling the factors contributing to it. The hypothesis was that practice in the video game would diminish the initial effects of religious views and political affiliations on how people resolve the conflict within the game. Students played several rounds of PeaceMaker and responded to questions about their religious and political beliefs. Results revealed an improvement in students’ game scores and a reduction in the correlations between scores and religion, political affiliation, and game performance across games played. Results suggest that the understanding of the conflict that is provided by the game simulation combined with practice may make it possible to reduce personal bias and learn to stand in another’s shoes when engaging in conflict resolution exercises.</p

Measuring and Predicting Shared Situation Awareness in Teams

In order to improve our understanding of situation awareness (SA) in teams performing in technologically advanced command, control, and communications (C3) operations, researchers need to develop valid approaches to assess both individual and shared SA. We investigated SA in an interdisciplinary military rescue operation training exercise. For this study, we developed procedures to measure the degree of shared SA between two team members and to improve the accuracy of their shared SA scores. We suggest that SA scores that are calculated using many existing methods may be inflated because they often fail to account for error in terms of both the amount of information that is thought to be relevant and in the accuracy of a person\u27s knowledge of it. We calculated true SA scores that account for both of these types of error. The measures were then used to evaluate five potential predictors of shared SA. Our analysis suggested that failure to compensate for error in SA may lead to overestimation of performance in a situation. The results also revealed a significant relationship between shared SA and participants\u27 distance from a central, joint service team, which acted as the organizational hub within the C3 structure. Shared SA was better the further away from the hub people were, which suggests that a person\u27s role and position within an organization affects the level of shared SA that can be achieved with other individuals

Predicting Shared Situation Awareness in Teams: A Case of Differential SA Requirements

In this paper, we report our efforts at developing a valid approach for measuring and predicting shared situation awareness (SA) in teams performing in complex operational environments. Participants were assigned to one of 4 teams (Navy, Army, Special Operations, or Joint Service) and completed a simulated military rescue operation training exercise. We developed procedures to measure the degree of shared SA between team members and to improve the accuracy of shared SA scores. The measures were then used to evaluate five potential predictors of shared SA (experience similarity, shared task knowledge, cognitive workload similarity, communication distance, organizational hub distance). We examined the relationship of these factors to specific queries that assessed different types of SA information requirements. Results indicated that four factors had significant relationships with shared SA, but that the factors related to each query changed in relation to the type of SA assessed by the query. We discuss the implications of these results for predicting shared SA under different situational conditions