Cultural Etiquette and its Impact on Directive Human Performance

We argue that traditional cultural factors (from Hofstede, Nisbett, etc.) are too abstract to provide good, predictive models of important human performance behaviors such as compliance with directives. Instead, we focus on culture-specific social interaction behaviors in language, gesture, etc. (i.e., "etiquette") as a more concrete and quantifiable bridge between abstract cultural factors and human performance. We describe a computational model of etiquette and face threat perception developed under other funding. In Phase I, we developed hypotheses about the relation of deep cultural factors to etiquette perception and directive compliance, with a testbed and experimental methodology for evaluating those hypotheses. In Phase II, we propose a series of experiments to validate and tune our computational model of these related phenomena. Experiments will involve human task performance in a militarily-relevant, yet controlled domain where directives are given. Experimenters will select participants for cultural factors and will quantitatively control the level of etiquette of issued directives. Relevant compliance data (e.g., compliance accuracy, response time, attitudes, etc.) will be collected as dependent variables. Finally, we will incorporate the resulting model in a prototype design (notionally, a user interface or training materials) to illustrating the effects of culture-specific etiquette on directive compliance.