Crisis Management Simulations: Lessons Learned from a Cross-cultural Perspective

Emergency crisis management is a highly dynamic and complex domain. It challenges performance and increases reliance on information, technology, people and context. Crisis events are something to which all nations must respond, however processes, policies, and responses to those events may be culturally defined. Culture, described as a set of characteristics, values and behaviors manifested within a group of people and shaped by historical experiences means that cognition can no longer be thought of as being universally the same across populations. To explore the role of culture within decision-making and distributed cognition, an initial collaborative pilot study was undertaken with the University of Manchester. The goals were to collect case data on the strength of cognitive and behavioral variables related to culture as it is operationalized within the NeoCITIES emergency response simulation. The study purported to test the influence of a naturalistic culture (U.S. and U.K.), hidden knowledge, and time stress on team performance to provide an initial understanding of how culture impacts cognition within an emergency crisis management setting. This initial study was a successful proof of concept that NeoCITIES could be used in an international comparative experiment. Although we did not achieve results with our initial pilot study, several significant lessons were learned in carrying out this cross-cultural research.