ABSTRACT
In order to successfully deal with crowds in host nations, American personnel must be able to understand the situation from the perspective of the crowd members. This claim is based on the assumption that crowd reactions depend in large part on how the relevant players (i.e., crowd members and security forces) interpret the situation. Past research in naturalistic decision making highlights the importance of mental models for how people make sense of situations (Klein, 1998; Klein, Phillips, Rall, & Peluso, 2004). According to Rouse and Morris (1986), mental models are “mechanisms whereby humans are able to generate descriptions of system purpose and form, explanations of system functioning and observed system states, and predictions of future system states” (p. 351). People’s mental models describe how they understand physical things like mechanical devices, but also their understanding of social and cognitive phenomena, such as crowd behavior, that tend to differ across cultures (Gopnik & Wellman, 1994; Lillard, 1998; Sieck, Rasmussen, & Smart, 2010).
