Exploring the effectiveness of online role play simulations to reduce groupthink in crisis management training

Abstract

Crisis management in law enforcement context is considered to be a kind of Naturalistic Decision-making (NDM), which is hard to acquire due to the ill-structured, non-determined nature of crisis is also a challenge. Crisis either natural or man-made comes in all forms and degree of intensity. In a NDM situation, the crisis management personnel are usually anticipated in a dynamic environment of high level stress and uncertainty. Therefore, each critical incident is different; it can neither be treated identically nor pre-determined. In addition, crisis management is a small group activity that involves a number of parties or roles at different geographic locations. Groupthink is a term coined by psychologist (Janis, 1972), Groupthink victims ignore alternatives and tend to make irrational decisions in facing crises. The literature review finds that group think tendency is high for crisis management, especially in law enforcement agencies. In fact, the danger of groupthink is the most serious threat to good decision-making for effective crisis management.

There are two sets of research questions for this study. The first set comprises three research questions on how the design features of an online role play simulation affect the effectiveness of crisis management training in a law enforcement context. The research focuses on three aspects: storytelling, use of multimedia and recording facilities.

The second set comprises two research questions on whether and how the use of an online role play simulation affects trainees’ learning and understanding of groupthink tendency. Many researchers suggest that role play simulation (RPS) is a suitable tool for crisis management training for the realisation of collaboration and authentic situation awareness. In this paper, a case study of crisis management training in the context of law enforcement using online RPS is illustrated. By using Bales' Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) method, the interactions of participants in training are observed and categorised. The results show that using online role play simulation in crisis management training has positive effect on the reduction of Groupthink tendency.

The existing groupthink research is mainly based on content analysis of retrospective data, and information or empirical observations gathered in laboratory settings. Very often, only a partial model is examined. Therefore, online role play simulations can be a new method to groupthink research. Since online role play simulations can provide a holistic scenario for the crisis management exercise. As such, the whole crisis process can be visualised by researchers and facilitators. Finally, the groupthink tendency can be observed, recorded and analysed. In fact, due to the complexity of the groupthink model, many researchers can only focus on partial or several variables of the whole process in their studies. This study provides a ground work on online role play simulation research with an application on crisis management training. Design-based Research (DBR) is adopted in this study and this methodology is new to this kind of research. DBR is proved to be a suitable methodology as researcher can improve and generate evidence-based claims about learning through iterations of refinement. In addition, this study also shows that online role play simulation can be a research tool for the holistic study of groupthink.