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The 1920s and Onward
Published in Sidney Dekker, Foundations of Safety Science, 2019
Accident-proneness was, according to Lahy, something that could be modified by amending the conditions of the person’s work, and by educating and intervening in the behavior of the worker. No consensus ever emerged on whether accident-proneness was a single trait or factor that could be captured in one quotient (like IQ), or that it was a combination of traits and factors. For much of the era, however, and for many of the producers and consumers of the research, accident-proneness had become firmly established as an individual and undesirable psychological trait. It kept a growing machinery of psychotechnik, of testing and selection, busy well into the WWII. The tone of the English psychologists had become bullish, claiming that: Accident proneness is no longer a theory but an established fact, and must be recognized as an important element in determining accident incidence. This does not mean that knowledge of the subject is complete, or that the liability of any particular individual to accident can with certainty be predicted. What has been shown, so far, is that it is to some extent possible to detect those most liable to sustain accidents.Farmer (1945, p. 224)
Paradigm shifts for total safety
Published in E. Scott Geller, Working Safe, 2017
This so-called “psychological approach” held that certain individuals were “accident prone.” By removing these workers from risky jobs or by disciplining them to correct their attitude or personality problems, it was thought that accidents could be reduced. As I discussed in Chapter 1, this focus on accident proneness has not been effective, partly because reliable and valid measurement procedures are not available. Also, the person factors contributing to accident proneness are probably not consistent characteristics or traits within people, but vary from time to time and situation to situation.
Error Traps and Recurrent Accidents
Published in James Reason, The Human Contribution, 2017
The idea that certain people, by dint of enduring personality characteristics, are more liable to misfortune goes back at least to the Book of Job and has wide popular appeal. Most of us think we know such people. Yet the notion of accident-proneness has a vexed scientific history that does not, on balance, support the idea of some relatively fixed traits that render certain individuals more likely to suffer accidents.
Accident proneness of bus drivers; controlling for exposure
Published in Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2021
But what is accident proneness, and why was it so heavily criticised? In essence, accident proneness was the notion that there are individual differences in the tendency to cause accidents, and that these tendencies are fairly stable over time and across environments, i.e. it is an innate characteristic which is not changed by, for example, accident involvement (e.g. Crawford 1971; Bernacki 1976; some alternative models assumed that an accident influenced the probability of another one occurring, either positively or negatively; Arbous and Kerrich 1951).