Abstract

COSENTINO, Alejandro César; AZZOLLINI, Susana Celeste; DEPAULA, Pablo Domingo  and  CASTILLO, Sergio Edgardo. Decision making under rationality / affectivity, training, and cultural saturation in multicultural situations: An experimental study with peacekeepers. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2016, vol.33, n.2, pp.283-298. ISSN 1668-7027.

The so called dual models that emerged in the70s suggest that there are two types of information processing with opposite characteristics to one another and are related to ways of making emotional and rational decisions. This research focused on the study of emotional and rational peace keepers' decision making. Peace keepers are military personnel that participate in United Nations Organization (UN) international forces in order to be deployed in conflict zones around the world to maintain peace and to provide humanitarian aid. In these missions, peacekeepers' behavior is ruled by codes which are committed to ensuring the highest standards of conduct in UN military operations. According to these UN rules, servicemen should not intervene in situations of not obvious risk or no imminent physical harm to civilians of the local population. It is worth noting that inappropriate peacekeepers ´interventions can have serious negative consequences in the mission. Consequently, in the predeployment stage peacekeepers are trained by qualified military personnel with core operational and cultural information related the country where they are going to be deployed to have an effective performance during their duty. At the moment of our research, Argentinian peacekeepers were deployed in Haiti. The objective of this study was to study the effects of the emotional / rational decision-making mode, the Argentine's soldiers training as peacekeeper, and the level of cultural saturation in the observed situations; over the decision to intervene in multicultural situations. For this study, a piece of software called SITDE with a series of audible videos that reflect different situations related to the UN peacekeeper mission was used. There were two SITDE versions that differed from each other due to the level of cultural representation. One version contains a set of videos with high typical Haitian´s cultural saturation. The other version, a set of homologous videos related to the other series, includes scenes with fewer aspects of Haitian´s elements. After watching each video participants had to decide whether to intervene or not to intervene in the observed scenes. They should report its decision by clicking on a screen displaying two buttons with the corresponding decision. The software recorded the participant's response and the response time of each scene. This study sought to corroborate three hypotheses about peacekeepers' decision making on culturally diverse scenes in which they had no danger of imminent attack: (a) decision making based on rational information processing compared to decision making based on affective / emotional processing leads to not intervene; (b) military experts in international peace missions (i.e., military with UN training) compared to the inexperienced (military with no UN training) make fewer interventions and (c) the high saturation of cultural elements of the scenes compared to scenes of low saturation of cultural elements leads to make fewer interventions. The hypotheses were verified through a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design. The 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design included the independent variables decision making modality, training as peace -keepers, and cultural saturation of the observed situation; and the dependent variable intervention in the observed situation. The military personnel´s decision-making was manipulated by differentiated instruction, and the cultural saturation of scenes was manipulated by the use of the two SITDE versions. Additionally, it has been analyzed the relationship between the individual trend to the emotional / rational decision-making and relevant variables. It was found that the individual trend to the rational decision making in urgent situations is negatively associated to the reaction time. The results are discussed related to the frame of the dual theories.

Keywords : Decision making; Emotional; Rational; Cross-cultural; Military personnel.

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