Managing Negative Interactions in Space Crews: The Role of Simulator Researchenvironments. Experiments can be conducted with procedures designed to facilitate
the prosocial behavior of the occupants. In the early days of the space program, when
anecdotal studies of life in extreme environments such as submarines were all we had,
these studies proved valuable and served us well. But spaceflight simulators can be
used to create situations more specific to spaceflight and do so in a laboratory setting
in which extraneous variables can be much better controlled.
Of course, spaceflight simulators on Earth cannot simulate weightlessness. That
is unfortunate because the higher the fidelity of the simulator, the better the trans-
fer to real-world situations. We have seen in aviation that extremely high-fidelity
flight simulators can be so effective for training that airline pilots transitioning to a
new airplane can take all of their training in a simulator and then go out and fly the
airplane successfully the first time. However, the inability to simulate weightlessness
by no means destroys the usefulness of spaceflight simulators as research tools for
the study of human behavior. NASA currently uses them effectively to train astro-
nauts for life on the International Space Station. Not every variable involved in
an extreme environment has to be present in a simulation for an analog to be able
to generalize usefully from one setting to another. If that were the case, the early
studies from real-world extreme environments would have been useless to NASA.
But they were not.
Now, as we enter this new era of spaceflight, we need to use simulators to
improve our understanding of the variables involved in successfully coping with the
new challenges that will confront us. How such simulators can be used as research
tools as opposed to training devices is not intuitively obvious. Since there have
been few such studies involving civilian participants, the general public knows lit-
tle of what goes on in such a study. Therefore, I will describe a study conducted in
my laboratory that will demonstrate how simulator studies can address both applied
and theoretical research questions. This study is particularly relevant to this paper
because it has given us important information about managing negative interper-
sonal interactions in a setting simulating those that would be found in future civil-
ian spaceflight.
This study was conducted for McDonnell Douglas Aerospace in Huntington
Beach, California, in the spring of 1996. The final report was submitted to the com-
pany and not published in the academic press. Here is an overview of the study con-
ducted in my laboratory that shows how we might change the course of spaceflight
design for the next phase in the history of life off planet Earth.