The Effects of Debriefing on the Performance and Attitude of Austrian University Students and Cultural Differences to Japanese Students

The present study examined the effects of debriefing on 132 Austrian university students as part of an international collaboration between Austria and Japan. There were eight experimental conditions. After pre-treatment, groups of four participants played the Highway Planning Game, which deals with cooperation and conflict. In addition to the analyses of the effects of the different debriefing methods on Austrian students, an intercultural comparison with Japanese students’ data (Kikkawa et al. 2018) was also done. The Austrian students showed the same pattern of results as the Japanese students in the previous study: task performance in the groups that played a game and then received a debriefing was better than that in the groups that either did not play the game or played the game but did not receive a debriefing. Austrian students showed significantly better performance under all conditions and higher scores on the leadership and own interests dimension compared with Japanese students.