ABSTRACT
As a young group researcher interested in small group productivity, the first author daydreamed about the “paradise for a small group researcher,” most often while waiting for undergraduate student participants who did not show up for her laboratory experiments. She imagined a close to real-life situation with a number of characteristics: competent and highly motivated participants; a research-friendly room (not too noisy, so that communication could be recorded; well lit, so there could be video recording); a task that was highly interdependent (thus inducing group processes) and complex (so there would be variance in performance); necessity of overt behavior, so group processes could be observed and coded. She wished for a rather short group process (as transcribing and coding is time-consuming), and finally she dreamt that there would be ample communication going on that could be related to group performance. It seemed much too much to ask for. However, some years later, she stumbled across the website of a group of physicians at a nearby hospital, presenting the “high-fidelity patient simulator” they used for training and research. The description surpassed the dream. The pictures showed medical professionals in a well-lit room gathered around a patient and obviously working in a highly interdependent way as a group. She wrote a mail. So, for a number of years, the authors of this chapter (two psychologists and two physicians) have been collaborating in research projects using a high-fidelity patient simulator that is situated in the Intensive Care Unit of the Basel University Hospital in Switzerland.
