Identifying the typical biases and their significance in the current safety management approaches

This is an interesting 2010 conference paper, discussing a range of biases in safety management practices, and their possible consequences for safety.

Note that this isn’t focused on cognitive biases, but more structural and belief systems.

They focus on four themes:

1) beliefs about individual behaviour

2) beliefs about organisations

3) safety models

4) safety management methods.

Some points:

·        “Safety management practices are based on underlying models or theories of organization, human behaviour and system safety”

·        These models or operating beliefs “are either explicit or implicit or a combination of both. An important function of theories and models of safety management is that they create expectations and suggest potential actions”

·        Expectations guide our attention and search for evidence “thus making it easier to confirm the accuracy of our original expectations by neglecting contradictory information”

·        “Views about how humans contribute to safety often remain negative among practitioners as well as researchers”

·        “The propensity to label negative outcomes as due to individual error tells more about general human tendencies in attributing causality than about the event itself”

·        “The attribution of error is a (social) judgment about human performance made with the benefit of hindsight”

·        “Human as bad apples and hindsight bias: “Looking for human errors after an event is a ”safe” choice, since one always finds them in hindsight”

·        “A common theme underlying the biases is a lack of systems view on safety “

·        “A systemic safety management takes into account people, technology and organization and their interaction in equal terms”

·        “such an approach can shift focus from people to technology to organizational aspects depending on their current safety significance”

Ref: Reiman, T., & Rollenhagen, C. (2010, June). Identifying the typical biases and their significance in the current safety management approaches. In Proceedings of the 10th International probabilistic safety assessment and management conference.

Study link: http://www.newviewofhealthandsafety.com/s/Typical-Biases-and-Their-Significance-in-Safety-Management-Approaches-3wgr.pdf

My site with more reviews: https://safety177496371.wordpress.com

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