Guidelines and Caveats for Manipulating Expectancies in Experiments Involving Human Participants

摘要

In a number of domains involving decision making under high time pressure, the appearance of an unexpected critical event can startle operators causing errors that may potentially lead to a chain reac-tion of unfavorable events. Simulating such situations in a laboratory requires overcoming several challenges tied to human responses to unexpected and rare critical events. We discuss cases of experi-mental studies that have incorporated simulations, critical events, interruptions, predictive displays and ecological displays involving naïve and expert participants. We spell out guidelines and caveats per-taining to training, expertise, temporal variables, critical event frequencies, scenario design, mediator and moderator variables to name a few. The guidelines and caveats may inform researchers in the de-sign of generalizable and reproducible experiments and in the analysis of data.