The Development of Situational Awareness in High Reliability Organizations

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This purpose of the proposed research is to examine how situational awareness (or its other similar outcroppings) develop within work dyads and teams required to behave very reliably, as in high reliability organizations (study 1). A second purpose is to examine what, if any, relationship exists between situational awareness and other local global processes (study 2). The investigators are particularly interested in contexts where errors of judgment or inference can lead to catastrophe. The investigators also intend to provide some theoretical rigor around the psychological constructs guiding the first part of the research, and embed those constructs within group processes (study 2), deepening our basic knowledge of the ways individual and group cognitive processes interact with contexts. Study 1 will focus on the Oakland Police Department's Emergency Dispatching Service (911), while Study 2 will take place at the Stanford anesthesiology simulator, which provides a situation in which distributed cognition can be more thoroughly investigated, and in which actors are tied to technologies long ago invented to solve an anesthesiology or operating problem.