What is a Good Plan? Cultural Variations in Expert Planners’ Concepts of Plan Quality

This article presents the results of a field research study examining commonalities and differences between American and British operational planners’ mental models of planning. We conducted Cultural Network Analysis (CNA) interviews with 14 experienced operational planners in the US and UK. Our results demonstrate the existence of fundamental differences between the way American and British expert planners conceive of a high quality plan. Our results revealed that the American planners’ model focused on specification of action to achieve synchronization, providing little autonomy at the level of execution, and included the belief that increasing contingencies reduces risk. The British planners’ model stressed the internal coherence of the plan, to support shared situational awareness and thereby flexibility at the level of execution. The British model also emphasized the belief that reducing the number of assumptions decreases risk. Overall, the American ideal plan serves a controlling function, whereas the British ideal plan supports an enabling function. Interestingly, both the US and UK would view the other’s ideal plan as riskier than their own. The implications of cultural models of plans and planning are described for establishing performance measures and designing systems to support multinational planning teams

US/UK Mental Models of Planning: The Relationship Between Plan Detail and Plan Quality

This paper presents the results of a research study applying a new cultural analysis method to capture commonalities and differences between US and UK mental models of operational planning. The results demonstrate the existence of fundamental differences between the way US and UK planners think about what it means to have a high quality plan. Specifically, the present study captures differences in how US and UK planners conceptualize plan quality. Explicit models of cultural differences in conceptions of plan quality are useful for establishing performance metrics for multinational planning teams. This paper discusses the prospects of enabling automatic evaluation of multinational team performance by combining recent advances in cultural modelling with enhanced ontology languages

Web-Based Knowledge Extraction and the Cognitive Characterization of Cultural Groups

The advent of Web 2.0 has provided new opportunities for cultural analysts to understand more about the cognitive characteristics of cultural groups. In particular, user-contributed content provides important indications as to the beliefs, attitudes and values of cultural groups, and this is an important focus of attention for those concerned with the development of cognitively-relevant models. In order to support the exploitation of the Web in the context of cultural modeling activities, it is important to deal with both the large-scale nature of the Web and the current dominance of natural language formats. In this paper, we outline an approach to support the exploitation of the Web in the context of cultural modeling activities. The approach begins with the development of qualitative cultural models (which describe the beliefs, concepts and values of cultural groups), and these models are subsequently used to develop an ontology-based information extraction capability (which harvests model-relevant information from online textual resources). We are currently developing a system to support the approach, and the continued development of this system should enable cultural analysts to more fully exploit the Web for the purpose of developing more accurate, detailed and predictively-relevant cognitive models

Holistan Revisited: Demonstrating Agent- and Knowledge-Based Capabilities for Future Coalition Military Operations

As a fundamental research program, the International Technology Alliance (ITA) aims to explore innovative solutions to some of the challenges confronting US/UK coalition military forces in an era of network-enabled operations. In order to demonstrate some of the scientific and technical achievements of the ITA research program, we have developed a detailed military scenario that features the involvement of US and UK coalition forces in a large-scale humanitarian-assistance/disaster relief (HA/DR) effort. The scenario is based in a fictitious country called Holistan, and it draws on a number of previous scenario specification efforts that have been undertaken as part of the ITA. In this paper we provide a detailed description of the scenario and review the opportunities for technology demonstration in respect of a number of ITA research focus areas

A cultural models approach for investigating the cognitive basis of terrorism

Terrorists attempt to communicate specific aspects of their ideological frameworks to shape the common perspective of their intended audiences. For the approach to be successful, the ideas they are promoting must fit within the cultural meaning systems shared across the population they are addressing. Knowing what messages will effectively persuade their constituents is likely intuitive for terrorists operating within their own cultural environment, but not necessarily for researchers who come from distinct cultural backgrounds. A method is thus described for studying in detail the common perspective that members of a culture bring to a situation. The method results in models of the culture that provide a basis for outsiders to begin to frame events from the cultural-insider point of view. The cultural models can then be used as an aid to anticipate how messages will be interpreted and evaluated by terrorists and their audiences.Publisher PD

Cultural Network Analysis: A Cognitive Approach to Cultural Modeling

The purpose of this chapter is to describe a rigorous, end-to-end methodology for modeling culture as networks of ideas that are distributed among members of a population. The method, Cultural Network Analysis (CNA), represents an interdisciplinary synthesis of techniques drawn from the fields of cognitive anthropology, cultural and cognitive psychology, naturalistic decision making, and decision analysis. CNA is used to develop cultural models for groups and populations, typically depicted as a network representation of the culturally shared concepts, causal beliefs, and values that influence key decisions. CNA can be usefully employed for a variety of applications, including the design of tools to support multinational collaborative planning and decision making, the development of situated cultural training programs, and characterizing the cognition of target audiences to support strategic communications campaigns

Semantic Networks and Shared Understanding: A Network-Based Approach to Representing and Visualizing Shared Understanding

Semantic networks were developed in the organizational communication literature to provide a means of representing the shared interpretations that people have of organizational message content. Semantic networks can also be used, we suggest, to support the representation and visualization of shared understanding in military coalition contexts. The basic approach is to create a network representing the degree of similarity between individuals with respect to their understanding of some item of interest. In principle, the data for such networks could be obtained in a variety of ways, although, in the current paper, we focus on the use of ‘cultural models’ (developed at either the individual or group level) to provide a measure of shared understanding. The use of a semantic network based approach to representing and visualizing shared understanding has a number of advantages, each of which are discussed at length in the current paper. These include the use of network techniques to analyse changes in shared understanding across time (particularly in response to organizational and technological changes) and the easy identification of individuals that may play special roles in supporting cross-community understanding. Furthermore, by combining semantic networks with techniques such as cultural network analysis (which can be used to develop individual- or group-level mental models) we can create semantic network models of shared understanding at either the individual or collective level. In the latter case, the technique affords a means of representing and visualizing the degree of shared understanding between specific cultural groups, and it is therefore ideally suited to military coalition environments, which feature the requisite inter-operation of culturally- and linguistically-disparate communities

Overconfidence in judgement for repeatable events

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/36108/2/b2014385.0001.001.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/36108/1/b2014385.0001.001.tx

Modelling the Dynamics of Collective Cognition: A Network-Based Approach to Socially-Mediated Cognitive Change

A number of studies in the network science literature have attempted to model the effect of network structure on cognitive state fluctuations in social networks. For the most part, these networks use highly simplified models of both cognitive state and social influence. In order to extend these studies and provide the basis for more complex network science simulations, a model of socially-mediated cognitive change is presented. The model attempts to integrate ideas and concepts from a number of disciplines, most notably psychology, evolutionary biology and complexity science. In the model, cognitive states are modelled as networks of binary variables, each of which indicates an agent’s belief in a particular fact. The links between variables represent the ‘logical’ dependencies between beliefs, and these dependencies are based on an agent’s knowledge of the domain to which the beliefs apply. Drawing on the psychological notion of cognitive dissonance, it is further suggested that agents are under internal pressure to adopt highly consistent belief configurations, and this identifies one source of cognitive dynamism in the model. Another source of dynamism derives from the structure of the social network. Here, the existence of network ties creates a dependency between the belief systems of connected agents. Cognitive change in such ‘coupled belief systems’ is modelled using Kauffman’s NK(C) model of co-evolutionary development in biological systems. As a final source of cognitive dynamism, the model incorporates the notion of an aggregate belief system (or cultural model), which represents the dominant set of beliefs associated with specific agent sub-groups. By explicitly incorporating the notion of an aggregate belief system into the model, the model supports the analysis of cognitive state fluctuations at the individual (psychological), social and cultural levels. It also provides the basis for future network science simulations that seek to study the complex interactions between these various levels