Cultural Etiquette and its Impact on Directive Human Performance

We argue that traditional definitions of cultural factors (e.g., Hofstede, Nisbett, etc.) are too abstract to provide good, predictive models of important human performance behaviors. Instead, we propose examination of culture-specific "etiquette" as a more concrete and quantifiable bridge between abstract cultural factors and human performance regarding compliance with issued directives. We describe a quantitative, computational model of etiquette and face threat perceptions that we are developed under other funding. We propose to integrate abstract cultural factors models into our quantitative etiquette model in the form of specific, hypothesized weighting factors, and then validate and tune these factors via a series of human performance experiments in a testbed that we will design in phase I and construct in phase II. Experiments will involve human task performance in a militarily-relevant domain where directives are given. Experimenters will select participants for cultural factors and will quantitatively control the level of etiquette of the directives. Relevant compliance data (e.g., accuracy, response time, attitudes, etc.) will be collected as a dependent variable. While we will select a testbed simulation and domain as a part of Phase I, candidates already exist in aviation cockpit interactions, multi-cultural air traffic control, and joint force urban stability operations.