CROSS-CULTURAL COGNITION
National groups differ in their cognition and perception. These differences have implications for technology transfer, multinational commerce, and military cooperation. They also have implications for predicting and deterring the actions of adversaries. Human Factors and Industrial-Organizational psychologists must understand how cognition varies across cultures and what these differences mean for people and technology. The Applied Psychology Laboratory is addressing these issues.
• As international contact increases, military and civilian organizations need to identify the cognitive characteristics of partners, competitors, and adversaries. They must be able to create plans and strategies for interacting with people from other nations. Our laboratory has worked with researchers from China, India, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan to create and test an assessment tool for capturing cognitive differences among national groups. We have also worked with Arabic speaking Middle Easterners to better understand this important group.
•Attribution is an important cognitive difference that influences decision making. Some groups tend to attribute events to dispositional causes, while others are more likely to use situational causes. While these differences contribute to international misunderstandings, there is yet little research to detail the impact of these differences and how they can be best managed. Research underway in our laboratory is examining attribution differences in business setting.
•Team decision making is critical in both corporate and military settings. It is even more complex for multinational teams. We have studied the demands placed on teams during multinational interchanges. Our long-term objective is to develop decision support systems and training programs that help people work in multination teams. We are also interested in representing these cultural differences in computational models.
Our research in cross-cultural cognition has been funding by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the Army Research Institute (ARI), the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), The Boeing Company, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), and the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO).
A few recent cross cultural cognition references:
Klein, H. A. & Kuperman, G. (2008). Through an Arab Cultural Lens. Military Review.
Klein, , H. A Lin, M.-H., Peng, K., Bhal, K., Radford, M. H. B., Choi, I., Noor, N., Khalid, H. M., Chan, D. (2008). Measuring and interpreting cultural differences in cognition. Final Report prepared for the United States Air Force Research Laboratory
Lin, M.-H. & Klein, H. A. (2008). Athletes, murderers, and a Chinese farmer: Cultural perspectives on sensemaking. In Schraagen, J.M.C., Militello, L., Ormerod, T., & Lipshitz, R. (Eds) (forthcoming). Macrocognition and Naturalistic Decision Making. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Lin, M-H. & Klein, H. A. (2005). The role of analytic-holistic thinking on sense making. 2005 SIOP Conference in Los Angeles, California.
Klein,, H.A. & Steele-Johnson, D. (2007). Multinational collaboration: From the laboratory to the field. In R. R. Hoffman (Ed.), Expertise out of context: Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Pgs. 473 – 506.
Klein, H. A. & McHugh, A. P. (2005). National differences in teamwork. In W. R. Rouse & K. B. Boff, (Eds). Organizational Simulation. New York: Wiley. (Submitted 2004)
Klein, H. A. (2005). Cultural differences in cognition: Barriers in multinational collaborations. . In H. Montgomery, R. Lipshitz, & B. Brehmer (Eds). How Professionals Make Decisions. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Klein, H. A., Lin, M.-H., & Klein G. (2005). International perspectives on naturalistic decision making functions. Seventh International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 15 – 17 June 2005
Lin, M.-H. & Klein, H. A. (2005). The role of analytic-holistic thinking on sense making. 2005 SIOP Conference in Los Angeles, California.
Klein, H. A. (2004). Cognition in natural settings: The Cultural Lens Model. In Michael Kaplan (Ed.). Cultural Ergonomics, Elsevier Science, Ltd.
Klein, H. A. (April, 2003). The Cultural Lens Model: Understanding cognitive differences and aviation safety. 12th International Symposium on Aviation Psychology. ISAP, Dayton, Ohio
Klein, H. A., Klein, G, & Mumaw, R. (2001). Culture-sensitive aviation demands: Links to cultural dimensions. Technical report completed for the Boeing Company. |
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