The Calibration of Situation Awareness and Confidence Within a Multinational Operational Net Assessment

Abstract

Individuals from 5 countries participated in an experiment to examine the effect of an operational net assessment (ONA) multinational information sharing (MNIS) procedure on coalition conflict resolution within a hypothetical precrisis situation. This article reports the findings for the effect of an ONA MNIS on situation awareness (SA) and the calibration of SA and confidence. In general, the findings revealed that the ONA MNIS procedure used in this experiment facilitated shared SA among the coalition teams. Although the participants were generally well calibrated, there was a trend toward overconfidence in their SA responses. These findings are discussed within the context of current and future multinational coalition environments.Because conflicts occur more rapidly and with less predictability as to their location than in the past, affected countries are increasingly dependent on distributed information processing to aid conflict resolution. An important consequence of the changing dynamics of conflict is the increasing importance of information warfare: "any action to deny, exploit, corrupt or destroy the enemy's information and its functions; protecting ourselves against those actions; and exploiting our own military information functions" (Endsley & Jones, 1997, p. 1). As successful conflict resolution becomes increasingly intertwined with the information age, it is widely acknowledged that information warfare, and the underlying situation awareness (SA) necessary to support it, will be a key component for successful conflict resolution (

Calibrating Situation Awareness and Confidence Within a Multinational Coalition Operation

“…In the present study, the calibration analyses revealed a trend toward underconfidence associated with higher SA scores and overconfidence for lower SA scores. These findings replicate previous research findings (Lichacz & Farrell, 2005) and suggest that the participants in this study might be inclined to be overly cautious in their decision-making when SA is high and likely to enter into decisions and actions where they should exercise greater caution when SA is lower (Griffin & Tversky, 1992), thereby setting up a potential disconnect (Endsley, 2000b) between the participants' levels of SA and their choices of action to be taken. As it happened, the French and German participants were the least well calibrated of the groups with a trend toward greater overconfidence in their responses.…”

“…Situation awareness is a cognitive construct that refers to our awareness, knowledge, and understanding of events in our immediate and future environment (Lichacz & Farrell, 2005) and has been identified as an important component of successful military team performance (Bolstad & Endsley, 2003;Matthews, Strater, & Endsley, 2004;Riley et al, 2006;Salas, Prince, Baker, & Shrestha, 1995). Specifically, good SA is believed to facilitate good decision-making.…”

“…Such operations are termed effects based operations (EBO): operations designed to influence the will of an adversary, own forces, or neutrals through the coordinated application of military and nonmilitary capability, to achieve desired strategic objectives (Lichacz & Farrell, 2005;Smith, 2002). Key to the successful achievement of strategic objectives is the effective organization and management of information to ensure that all members of the coalition maintain equivalent and high levels of SA throughout the conflict resolution process to maintain common purpose and effort.…”

An Examination of Situation Awareness and Confidence within a Distributed Information Sharing Environment

“…In real-life settings, such as military contexts, this could result in a willingness to engage in ill-conceived responses that could result in entirely unanticipated consequences of a life-and-death nature. Surprisingly, little research has been conducted to examine the relationship between SA and confidence (Lichacz & Farrell, 2005).…”

“…This paper reports a subset of findings from an experiment designed to study performance in a distributed, multinational, simulated stabilization mission. This experiment contained participants from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, U.K., and U.S., and examined a full range of human factors issues (see Lichacz and Farrell, 2005). For this paper, the relationship between SA and confidence for the Canadian participants is reported.…”