Geller Ch 46

1
Geller Ch 4-6
2
Why do we act unsafely?

• Risk taking is rarely punished, instead it
  consistently rewarded with convenience, comfort,
  or time saved.
• BASIC ID represents the complexity of people
• Behavior
• Attitude
• Sensation
• Imagery
• Cognition
• Interpersonal
• Drugs

3
Unintentional Errors

• Capture errors
• A familiar activity or routine seemingly captures
  you and takes over an unfamiliar activity.
• Description errors
• Similar characteristics of items lead to errors
• 3. Loss of activation errors
• Forgetting the antecedent that occasioned the
  behavior is no longer controlling behavior
• Walk into a room, forget why, walk to last room
  to recall
• This is called precurrent behavior by Skinner
  it is behavior that increases the probability of
  reinforcement.
• Mode Errors
• Probable when we engage in a task involving
  multiple options or modes of operation

4
Unintentional vs Calculated risks

• Unintentional errors occur at the input/output
  stages of information processing
• Calculated risks occur at the decision making
  stages of information processing

5
Interpersonal Influence

• Peer influence
• Social conformity
• People might act unsafely b/c others do
• Power of authority
• People might act unsafely out of obedience (just
  following orders)

6
Ch 5 Perceived Risk

• Your perception of events is biased by your
  expectations of them.
• Our perceptions are biased
• Biased by context
• The situation often dictates behavior
• Biased by our past (history)
• Upside-down face

7
Risk Perception

• Choice
• If we choose the action, it is seen as less
  risky.
• 2. Familiarity
• The more we know about it, the less we perceive
  it.
• Publicity can influence risk perception
• Sympathy for victims
• Personalizing experiences of others increases
  perceived risk
• E.g., Sharing near hits personal stories
• Well understood hazards are perceived as less
  risky, b/c we think we can control them
• Acceptable consequences
• If the risk appears to be for no reason, we
  perceive greater risk
• Sense of fairness
• If fair, then lower perceived risk if unfair,
  then higher perceived risk

8
Risk Compensation

• VERY widely held among safety professionals and
  scientists
• People adjust their behavior to compensate for
  changes in perceived risk.
• E.g., getting cut is part of the job people
  who express this belief do not tend to behave
  safely around sharps.
• Premature cognitive commitment

9
Geller Ch 6Stress vs Distress

• Stressors and attributions can lead to at-risk
  behavior.
• 75-85 of all industrial injuries are related to
  inappropriate reactions to stress
• Stress-related headaches are the leading cause of
  lost work time in the US!
• Stress
• Psychological and physiological reactions to
  events or situations in our environment. The
  triggers are called stressors. Ex. Of stressors?
• Yerkes-Dodson Law
• Why are some people stressed by events and others
  are not?
• Major life events scale

10
Coping and Stress

• Certain personality factors make some people more
  resistant to stress
• Learned helplessness vs learned optimism
• Learned helplessness (Seligman, 1975)
• The belief that nothing I do matters
• Relationship to safety?
• Optimism believing you have control over the
  consequences of your behavior
• How do you build optimism?
• Fitness social support coping mechanisms.
• Others?

11
Attributional Bias

• Fundamental attribution error
• Explaining the behavior of others, we attribute
• Internal factors as causes
• Explaining your own behavior, you attribute
• Internal factors for success causes
• External factors for failure causes
• The point?
• These biases reduce stress
• Without treating or reducing stress, illness
  occurs.