Short- and Long-Term Effects of Participation in a Cross-Cultural Simulation Game on Intercultural Awareness

摘要

The increase in military operations in urban terrain has created a requirement for deployed personnel to interact with people from other cultural backgrounds. This research aims to identify a base level method of enhancing the general cultural awareness of deployed personnel. Previous research in the business community has led to developing simulation games to enhance these generic intercultural skills. The general approach of this work is for teams of players, each adopting a different synthetic culture, to negotiate a pre- defined outcome with the other teams. The aim is to produce insight into cultural differences through interactions with others, and to develop skills for dealing with those differences through negotiation. Debriefs immediately following game play are used to reinforce learning. To date, however, there are no quantitative methods of measuring the effectiveness of these games in terms of their ability to change attitudes and awareness. In addition, there do not appear to be any attempts to examine long-term retention of such changes. Consequently, this research measured the short- and long-term effectiveness of training through simulation to enhance intercultural awareness. Overall, results indicate an immediate and long-term increase in cultural understanding, while there were no changes in underlying value systems.