SIFT journal publication on Teams and Etiquette

SIFT researchers Dr. Christopher Miller, Peggy Wu and Tammy Ott have had an article accepted to the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making. This paper reports work done under the E4D2 program and is titled “Politeness in Teams: Implications for Directive Compliance Behavior and Associated Attitudes.” It appears in print in Volume 6 Issue 2 June 2012 pp. 214 - 242. The abstract can be found here. The work reported used SIFT’s computational model of perceived politeness to design and analyze the results of several experiments. This paper focuses comparing the behaviors and attitudes of professional (military combat air controllers) and non-professionals (college students) when responding to polite or rude directive givers (simulated field operators asking the participant for information during a fire fighting task). Politeness improved all participants’ (whether professional or non-professional) attitudes about the directive giver. More interestingly, politeness significantly influenced all participants’ compliance rates, but it did so differently for professionals and novices: novices were more likely to comply with polite directive givers but professionals were more likely to comply with rude ones. This is concrete proof that politeness behaviors play an important role even for highly trained professionals, but it also suggests that professionals can be trained to use perceived politeness or rudeness in ways that differ from novices.