Biography:

Bjørn Sætrevik is a clinical psychologist (2003) with a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience (2007). He is a professor of general psychology at the Department of psychosocial science at the University of Bergen and is a member of the Operational psychology research group. Most of Sætrevik’s research is related to applied decision making in safety critical environments. Among his research interests are cognitive control of attention, implicit learning, situation awareness, human performance, perceived risk, public health, teamwork, leadership, and communication. Sætrevik engages with principles for open and transparent research in his research and teaching.

Bjørn Sætrevik

Abstract:

Team members must agree about their task and their task work for a team to function well. When there are alarm states at Equinor’s installations in the North Sea, the company’s emergency response teams muster in a ready room at Sandsli to handle the event. These are rotating teams of about 10 members that are assigned specific emergency roles. They muster to appraise the emergency, advise the offshore personnel, gather onshore and offshore resources, communicate with external parties, and plan and coordinate their own teamwork. To achieve this, they need to have aligned dynamic mental models of the offshore situation. Across several research projects, we have examined the collaboration within these teams during their regular scenario training exercises. We have developed measurement tools to assess the degree to which the team members have the same understanding of the situation and teamwork (i.e., “shared mental models”). We have examined which team factors contribute to shared mental models and have attempted to provide the teams with tools they may use to improve their work. Such confirmatory research in social science requires clearly formulated and falsifiable hypotheses. However, we often encounter hypotheses that are poorly phrased, ambiguous, potentially contradictory, have unclear variable referents, and can be testing in a variety of ways. In an ongoing project we are preparing an online tool that students and researchers can use phrase hypotheses. The tool restricts and standardizes the variables and hypotheses are phrased, and outputs a machine-readable variable list and hypotheses that can be used in preregistrations, registered reports, empirical articles, or student theses. I will present the status of the development of the tool.