Workload Transition Implications for Individual and Team Performance (1993) / Chapter Skim
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8 Decision Making
8 Decision Making
Pages 198-213
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From page 198... ...
The sluggishly handling plane never gained necessary air speed and crashed into the 14th Street Bridge in Washington, DC. In contrast, the problem-solving and decision-making sequence followed by the flight crew of the United flight 232, which suffered a total hydraulics failure over Iowa, was testimony to the good judgment of the team in crisis bringing a totally crippled and nearly uncontrollable jet to earth (see Chapter 101.
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From page 199... ...
In most teams, decision-making responsibilities fall most heavily on the team leader-the tank commander, the airplane pilot in command, the hospital physician, or the fire chief. These individuals possess the ultimate responsibility for choosing the appropriate course of action, but other members of the team also play a critical role in communicating the information on which the optimal decision can and should be based.
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From page 200... ...
Vincennes when the Iranian airliner was shot down, it was apparent that the salient writing of the word F14 on a message board in the combat information center, following the uncertain hypothesis of the aircraft's identify, contributed to the ultimate misidentification of the aircraft. Which hypothesis a decision maker chooses to base his or her actions on depends very much on which hypothesis is most available in memory, rather than in fact which may be the most likely in the circumstances.
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From page 201... ...
EXPERTISE IN DIAGNOSIS The information flow in Figure 8.1 suggests that human decision makers go through a time-consuming computational process of evaluating and interpreting evidence, relying heavily on the limited capacity of working memory. Yet under time pressure and in potential crisis situations, there is good evidence that expert decision makers-the skilled tank commander, pilot, or nuclear power plant control room operator may adopt a very different strategy of hypothesis diagnosis in which they simply match the available evidence with the most similar experience already stored in longterm memory (Ebbeson and Koneci, 19811.
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From page 202... ...
. This is because a situation that is generally similar to the mental representation of past experience, but may be different in some key respects, could be classified as identical, with those key differences simply ignored (i.e., anchoring on what is available from past experience)
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From page 203... ...
It is often assumed that this quantity is the subjective expected utility, which is computed as the utility (subjective value) of each possible outcome for the choice, multiplied by the subjective probability that that outcome will be observed.
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From page 204... ...
The tank commander might, for example, choose between a safe retreat, with a sure loss of position but sure preservation of safety, and a risky advance, win a low probability of encountering fatality-inducing battle conditions. In analogous circumstances, when the choice is between negatives, Kahneman and Tversky found that people usually are biased to choose the risky option.
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From page 205... ...
Analogous to our treatment of diagnosis, the alternative direct memory retrieval method of decision making shown by experts is not necessarily better than the strategy shown by novices, although it is more rapid and made with less effort. The strategy will lead to the choice of actions that are familiar and easy to recall.
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From page 206... ...
There is a high payoff in investing resources into acquiring this static knowledge or situation awareness, since it will be unlikely to change and can then be used as a basis for fast and effective decision making after the transition. Second, there is a class of knowledge and information that can be gathered prior to transition that has uncertainty associated with it.
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From page 207... ...
(1988a, 1988b) found that pilot decisions made under the combined stress of noise and time pressure were degraded to the extent that they depended on visualization of the airspace.
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From page 208... ...
Furthermore, given that accurate performance on certain kinds of decisions depends on a time-consuming weighing of various alternatives, it is reasonable to conclude that decision performance following transition will be more error prone, to the extent that it depends on an analytic computational strategy. Alternatively, it can be predicted that the preferred strategy of decision making will be likely to shift to one involving direct memory retrieval, given that the operator has stored the necessary domain-related knowledge base (Klein, 19891.
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From page 209... ...
While not yet fully validated as an effective technique, it would seem that providing decision makers with some level of training into the nature of heuristics, and the understanding of probability would be of considerable value in many applied contexts. Domain Training An alternative form of training to that used in debiasing is direct train ing in the domain of the decision itself (rather than in the mechanics of the decision process)
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From page 210... ...
has reviewed the effectiveness of air crew decision training in a variety of aviation programs and has concluded that such programs substantially reduce the likelihood of erroneous pilot judgments. Team Cohesion The final remediation addresses the need to create efficient decision making teams within which the communication of information necessary for optimal diagnosis and choice proceeds in a smooth and unambiguous fashion.
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From page 211... ...
The limitations of decision making can be remediated by one of four techniques: computer-based decision aiding, particularly that which emphasizes the display and organization of relevant cues, training of selfawareness of the decision maker's biases, training in the decision domain, and development of team cohesion. REFERENCES Bailey, R.W.
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From page 212... ...
Technical Report WHIPP 15. Madison, Wisconsin: Hu man Information Processing Program.
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From page 213... ...
1988b Stress and pilot judgment: An empirical study using MIDIS, a microcomputerbased simulation. In Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 32nd Annual Meeting.
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