Blame, guilt and punishment and the language of investigations

Does language, like used in investigations, affect organisational learning following events?

This banger from Crista Vesel, MSc discusses the role of language and causal assignment of agency and how it can hinder learning.

Summary posted next week. I can’t do it justice, but gave it a go.

From the paper:

· People naturally want to know who or what was responsible for an action and particularly something undesirable – called agency

· Examples like Bob spilled the chemical, where Bob is the agent of the action. This simplistic sentence, however, doesn’t tell us whether Bob spilled the chemical intentionally, by accident, or was simply near it

· Despite this, “We likely assume that the agent of the action acted independently and made a free will choice to act”; these assumptions influence learning from events

· “Linguistic framing of events has been shown to directly affect the assignment of guilt, blame, and punishment of human actors”

· The language of written accident reports play a role in identifying and agents and linking them to events

· When observing others, a tendency is to “attribute that person’s behavior to internal causes (for example, the person’s disposition or mental state) and sometimes to external causes” – the fundamental attribution error

· This effect “makes it easier to judge a person’s negative actions as coming from their own volition and disposition”

· Research has highlighted that simple linguistic changes to an event’s description can effect the assignment of agency, but “most of our own agentive language variations are invisible to us”

· The author discusses the Serious Accident Investigation Guide in the US Forest Service. The first para “presupposes that the cause of accidents is human failure”. This guide repeated the word failure 91 times throughout and particularly regarding people

· “it is unlikely that a single, objective story exists around an event… Memories, experiences, and language will differ when an event is retold, and written descriptions will be subject to linguistic bias and shortcuts”

· Use of active verbs can also shift causal attributions, like use of active verb voice, “Sara hit the ball”, directing agency to Sara being the one that hit the ball heightens attributions of control over passive voice (“the ball was hit”)

· This attribution effect may still remain even if the agent’s actions were presented as nonintentional

· Investigators may search for human failure and place significant weight on human agency

Author: Vesel, C. (2020). Agentive language in accident investigation: Why language matters in learning from events. ACS Chemical Health & Safety, 27(1), 34-39.

Study link: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chas.0c00002

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

LinkedIN post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benhutchinson2_does-language-like-used-in-investigations-activity-7210052471283437568-ufhd?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop