Summer 1999
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Although safety is designed into all kinds of airplanes–from top-gun fighters to jumbo jetliners to single-engine prop planes–tragedies still occur. But if research being conducted by Robert Mauro, a University of Oregon associate professor of psychology is a success, we may be en route to better pilots and safer skies.
"We are looking at how pilots make their decisions–the good decisions and the bad ones," says Mauro, who is head of the UO psychology department and a member of the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences. "These are important questions because most air crashes are due to human error."
Surprisingly little is known about how experts make decisions. For decades, psychologists have conducted decision-making studies in laboratories by using college student volunteers who are asked to work on problems far removed from everyday life. But these studies, relying upon so-called "naïve" subjects, do not reflect how decisions are made by experts such as pilots.
"Researchers began to realize that people in the real world frequently do not make decisions the way student subjects do in the laboratory," Mauro notes. "As a result, such questions as ‘How do people solve important problems?’ and ‘How do we encourage good decision-making and discourage bad?’ have remained largely unanswered."
So Mauro decided to study experts. A licensed pilot himself, his idea was to examine the decision-making processes–choices of potentially life-and-death significance–of airplane pilots. A good idea, but how to pull it off?
"Pilots tend to be quite busy people and not usually located in proximity to psychology labs," Mauro explains. "We needed to figure out how to get the laboratory to the subject."
The answer turned out to be the World Wide Web.
In August 1998 Mauro brought the idea for the project to the staff of the UO New Media Center (NMC), a group that uses the latest digital technologies to create innovative multimedia applications. Mauro asked if New Media Center experts could help him devise a system that would work on the Internet and meet a number of other requirements. Could such an interactive system guarantee the confidentiality of the subjects' responses? Could it measure the time it took each subject to examine different sources of information and make a decision? Could it record the multiple stages of decision-making?
The technical challenges appealed to NMC staff and student workers, who enjoy stressing the "new" in "New Media." In the words of technology manager Harold Hersey, "If we’re not breaking ground on every new project, we’re doing something wrong."
Mauro and the NMC’s technical and graphic design staff set to work creating an environment that functionally simulates a pilot’s preflight and in-flight experience with maps, weather reports, and interactions with air traffic controllers. Audio effects such as engine hum and visual indicators such as clouds enhance the simulation. In the end, the NMC was able to meet all of Mauro’s requirements, and the Internet-based Decision Research System (IDRS) was born.
Once final testing and tweaking are completed, a pilot anywhere in the world will be able to access IDRS via the Internet and take part in the research. It takes only about a half hour for the subject to complete the full simulation, yet it yields a huge amount of information. For example, what information did the pilot skip over and what was most closely examined, when were final decisions arrived at and with what sense of certainty? The data gathered from each pilot are pooled with those from other pilots in a research database.
"The database will be large enough to support significant analysis that should tell us a great deal about the decision-making process," Mauro says.
Mauro is interested in applying his work to improved pilot training and flight safety. But as a decision scientist, he is also excited by the prospect of extending his new web-based testing method to other areas of study.
"With very little alteration, the design developed in this work with the New Media Center opens the door to the study of all kinds of other interesting groups who make important decisions–physicians as they make diagnoses, CEOs as they guide corporations, stock brokers as they recommend purchases and sales, generals as they consider military action–the list goes on."
Mauro stresses that basic research becomes the stepping stone for beneficial applications.
"Once we fully understand how these processes work–and they may work quite differently in various fields–the next step will be to devise improved methods for teaching. Better training may allow novices to become experts in a shorter period of time than has been possible in the past. Safer skies may only be the beginning."