• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Safety Risk .net

Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk

Discover More on this Site

  • Home
    • About
      • Privacy Policy
      • Contact
  • FREE RESOURCES
    • FREE SAFETY eBOOKS
    • FREE DOWNLOADS
    • TOP 50
    • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS
    • Find a Safety Consultant
    • Free Safety Program Documents
    • Psychology Of Safety
    • Safety Ideas That Work
    • HEALTH and SAFETY MANUALS
    • FREE SAFE WORK METHOD STATEMENT RESOURCES
    • Whats New In Safety
    • FUN SAFETY STUFF
    • Health and Safety Training
    • SAFETY COURSES
    • Safety Training Needs Analysis and Matrix
    • Top 20 Safety Books
    • This Toaster Is Hot
    • Free Covid-19 Toolbox Talks
    • Download Page – Please Be Patient With Larger Files…….
    • SAFETY IMAGES, Photos, Unsafe Pictures and Funny Fails
    • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
    • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • PSYCHOLOGY OF SAFETY & RISK
    • Safety Psychology Terminology
    • Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk – Prof Karl E. Weick
    • The Psychology of Leadership in Risk
    • Conducting a Psychology and Culture Safety Walk
    • The Psychology of Conversion – 20 Tips to get Started
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk And Safety
    • Psychology and safety
    • The Psychology of Safety
    • Hot Toaster
    • TALKING RISK VIDEOS
    • WHAT IS SAFETY
    • THE HOT TOASTER
    • THE ZERO HARM DEBATE
    • SEMIOTICS
    • LEADERSHIP
  • Covid-19
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Covid-19 Returning to Work Inductions, Transitioning, Safety Start Up and Re Entry Plans
    • Covid-19 Work from Home Safety Checklists and Risk Assessments
    • The Hierarchy of Control and Covid-19
    • Why Safety Loves Covid-19
    • Covid-19, Cricket and Lessons in Safety
    • The Covid-19 Lesson
    • Safety has this Covid-19 thing sorted
    • The Heart of Wisdom at Covid Time
    • How’s the Hot Desking Going Covid?
    • The Semiotics of COVID-19 and the Social Amplification of Risk
    • Working From Home Health and Safety Tips – Covid-19
    • Covid-19 and the Hierarchy of Control
  • Dr Rob Long Posts
    • Learning Styles Matter
    • There is no HIERARCHY of Controls
    • Scaffolding, Readiness and ZPD in Learning
    • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
    • Presentation Tips for Safety People
    • Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts
    • It’s Only a Symbol
    • Ten Cautions About Safety Checklists
    • Zero is Unethical
    • First Report on Zero Survey
    • There is No Objectivity, Deal With it!
  • Quotes & Slogans
    • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
    • When Slogans Don’t Work
    • 77 OF THE MOST CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
    • 500 BEST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2020
    • 167 CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Safety Acronyms
    • You know Where You Can Stick Your Safety Slogans
    • Sayings, Slogans, Aphorisms and the Discourse of Simple
    • Spanish Safety Slogans – Consignas de seguridad
    • Safety Slogans List
    • Road Safety Slogans
    • How to write your own safety slogans
    • Why Are Safety Slogans Important
    • Safety Slogans Don’t Save Lives
    • 40 Free Safety Slogans For the Workplace
    • Safety Slogans for Work

Emotions, Bias and Heuristics in Risk

June 21, 2020 by Dr Rob Long Leave a Comment

imageThe emotions drive decision making and ought to be of interest to those who care about how people manage risk.

It is useful when thinking about human emotions that we identify different ways, impulses and unconscious drives that trigger decision making.

Emotions are integrated into the very nature of what it is be a fallible human and it is this ‘embodiment’ of emotions that separates humans from machines and objects.

All emotions have good and bad sides to them eg. anxiety in the face of risk can be protective and drive caution but, too much anxiety can make you sick. Similarly, anxiety can make one so fearful that they freeze when they should act. Similarly, overconfidence usually results in poor decision making and excessive risk founded in ignorance.

Integral to understanding the emotions is the connection to many cognitive biases and heuristics, these are essential to being a fallible human and needing to act fast and efficiently in the world. A useful guide to cognitive bias can be downloaded here: CLICK HERE OR ON IMAGE BELOW

image

In order to be fast and efficient in living, fallible humans tend to create heuristics (shortcuts) when there is:

· Too much information

· Not enough meaning

· Need to act fast and,

· When needing to remember

No heuristic is good or bad until we perceive that the heuristic used did or didn’t match the outcome. Most of the time our learned heuristics keep us safe and help us move through the world quickly and effectively without being harmed.

Our emotions, biases and heuristics are all interconnected and unconscious. What happens most often is we unconsciously recognize a social context (https://safetyrisk.net/mapping-social-influence-strategies/) and unconsciously respond to our biased perception of risk. This is why understanding the subjectivity of risk is also important (https://safetyrisk.net/all-risk-is-subjective/).

One of the values of meeting with others and conversing about expected risks and documenting them is to try and create a common understanding of risk if the environment can be controlled. However, when in the field and on site where things change rapidly, turbulence occurs and wheels fall off and humans don’t have time to access paperwork, they rely on heuristics, bias, emotions and experience to get them through. Surely, such an important part of being human would be of high importance in any Body of Knowledge? You would think that a discussion of the unconscious, bias, emotions and heuristics would be foundational to any Body of Knowledge about how humans interface with risk.

Yet in the AIHS BoK, in Chapter 7: The Human – As a biological system and Chapter 8.1: The Human- Basic Psychological Principles there is no discussion of these important human ways of ‘being’. Indeed, there is no discussion of the human unconscious in the AIHS BoK nor social psychology but over 30 Chapters on hazards. Indeed, in the Chapter 31.2 OHS Risk and Decision Making, heuristics are mentioned once, there is no discussion of the unconscious and the notion of bias is glossed over.

Safety is indeed, the industry of objects.

From the evidence in the BoK we can only determine that safety knowledge is about being hazard-centric. This is an industry that knows much about objects but precious little about persons. Indeed, there is nothing in the BoK that even seeks to define personhood, even in the chapter entitled Ethics (that is not about ethics but duty). The beginning of an Ethic in Risk is defining personhood.

So, when one knows little about the emotions, bias and heuristics and is consumed by objects and zero, it is a natural outcome to demonize humans as objects and demonize the emotions simply because they are misunderstood by an industry that is silent about them. And this seems to be the basis for how the industry self-defines itself as professional.

  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
  • More about Rob
Dr Rob Long

Dr Rob Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions
Dr Rob Long

Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)

  • Memorials and Monuments, A Lesson in What is NOT Said - January 27, 2021
  • Intuition and Safety - January 24, 2021
  • The Linguistics of Zero - January 24, 2021
  • You Can’t Believe in Zero and Learning at The Same Time - January 21, 2021
  • Poisoning the Professional Waterhole - January 21, 2021
Dr Rob Long
PhD., MEd., MOH., BEd., BTh., Dip T., Dip Min., Cert IV TAA, MRMIA Rob is the founder of Human Dymensions and has extensive experience, qualifications and expertise across a range of sectors including government, education, corporate, industry and community sectors over 30 years. Rob has worked at all levels of the education and training sector including serving on various post graduate executive, post graduate supervision, post graduate course design and implementation programs.

Please share our posts

  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Robert Long, Social Psychology of Risk Tagged With: bias, emotion, heuristics

Reader Interactions

Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below Cancel reply

Primary Sidebar

How we pay for the high cost of running of this site – try it for free on your site

Visit Count – Started Jan 2015

  • 21,351,847 Visitors

Never miss a post - Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address and join over 30,000 other discerning safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Recent Comments

  • Rob Long on Memorials and Monuments, A Lesson in What is NOT Said
  • Rob Long on Memorials and Monuments, A Lesson in What is NOT Said
  • Frank Garrett on Memorials and Monuments, A Lesson in What is NOT Said
  • Wynand on Memorials and Monuments, A Lesson in What is NOT Said
  • Kenny on How To Write a Safety Report
  • Rob Long on Fire Pit Safety
  • Rob Long on Intuition and Safety
  • Serge Massicotte on Fire Pit Safety
  • Bernard Corden on Intuition and Safety
  • Rob Long on You Can’t Believe in Zero and Learning at The Same Time

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Featured Downloads

  • Public-Event-Risk-Management-Checklist-HD.doc (960 downloads)
  • Manual Handling Risk Assessment Template (401 downloads)
  • My_Defining Moments in Safety .pdf (2083 downloads)
  • National-Emergency-Risk-Assessment-Guidelines.pdf (1189 downloads)
  • Planning For Your School Fund Raising Event (107 downloads)
  • Task Risk Assessment Template (402 downloads)
  • Safety-Backronym-Poster.pdf (361 downloads)
  • UV_Risk_Assessment_Checklist-1.doc (879 downloads)
  • How To Make Your Own Cloth Face Mask (187194 downloads)
  • Accident-Incident-Investigation-eBook-Rev1.pdf (7405 downloads)
  • ABCs Of Heavy Lifting (4423 downloads)
  • Envisioning Risk (96 downloads)
  • Zero-to-HRO.docx (796 downloads)
  • Risk-and-Safety-Schools-of-Thought.docx (1973 downloads)
  • Electrical_Equipment_Risk_Assessment_v2.0-1.doc (7137 downloads)

Recent Posts

  • Happy New Year for 2021 and Theme
  • Memorials and Monuments, A Lesson in What is NOT Said
  • Intuition and Safety
  • The Linguistics of Zero
  • You Can’t Believe in Zero and Learning at The Same Time
  • Poisoning the Professional Waterhole
  • Zero Vision Creates Mindless Gobbledygook
  • The Seduction of Slogans in Safety
  • Certificate, Diploma and Masters Studies in SPoR
  • Measurement Anxiety in Safety

Footer

AUTHORS

  • Alan Quilley
    • Heinrich–Industrial Accident Prevention
    • The Problem With ZERO Goals and Results
  • Bernard Corden
    • AHH$ Covid$afe Chri$tma$ New$letter
    • Paradise by the dashboard light
  • Bill Sims
    • Employee Engagement: Chocolate, Vanilla, or Strawberry?
    • Injury Hiding-How do you stop it?
  • Craig Clancy
    • Task Based vs Activity Based Safe Work Method Statements
    • Safety And Tender Submissions
  • Daniel Kirk
    • It’s easy being wise after the event.
    • A Positive Safety Story
  • Dave Whitefield
    • Safety is about…
    • Safety and Compliance
  • Dennis Millard
    • Are You Risk Intelligent?
    • Honey they get me! They get me at work!
  • Drewie
    • Downturn Doin’ Your Head In? Let’s Chat….
    • How was your break?
  • Gabrielle Carlton
    • All Care and No Care!
    • You Are Not Alone!
  • George Robotham
    • How to Give an Unforgettable Safety Presentation
    • How To Write a Safety Report
  • Goran Prvulovic
    • Safety Manager – an Ultimate Scapegoat
    • HSE Performance – Back to Basics
  • James Ellis
    • In search of plan B in workers’ recovery
    • What and how should we measure to support recovery from injury?
  • James Parkinson
    • To laugh or not to laugh
    • People and Safety
  • John Toomey
    • Who is Responsible for This?
    • Who Are Your People?
  • Karl Cameron
    • Abby Normal Safety
    • The Right Thing
  • Ken Roberts
    • Safety Legislation Is Our Biggest Accident?
    • HSE Trip Down Memory Lane
  • Mark Perrett
    • Psychology of Persuasion: Top 5 influencing skills for getting what you want
  • Mark Taylor
    • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures
    • Enculturing Safety
  • Max Geyer
    • WHS Legislation is NOT about Safety it’s about Culture
    • Due Diligence Is Not Just Ticking Boxes!
  • Matt Thorne
    • It was the SIA until someone wanted to swing from the Chandelier
    • Common Sense is Remarkably Uncommon
  • Peter Ribbe
    • Is there “Common Sense” in safety?
    • Who wants to be a safety professional?
  • Phil LaDuke
    • Hey Idiots, You’re Worried About the Wrong Things
    • Misleading Indicators
  • Admin
    • Happy New Year for 2021 and Theme
    • Certificate, Diploma and Masters Studies in SPoR
  • Dr Rob Long
    • Memorials and Monuments, A Lesson in What is NOT Said
    • Intuition and Safety
  • Rob Sams
    • I’m just not that into safety anymore
    • Social ‘Resiliencing’
  • Barry Spud
    • Barry Spud’s Hazard Control Tips
    • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
  • Sheri Suckling
    • How Can I Get the Boss to Listen?
  • Safety Nerd
    • The Block isn’t portraying safety as it should be
    • Toolbox Talk Show–PPE
  • Wynand Serfontein
    • Why The Problem With Learning Is Unlearning
    • I DON’T KNOW
  • Zoe Koskinas
    • Why is fallibility so challenging in the workplace?

FEATURED POSTS

Humanising Workers Compensation (Sydney Workshop)

The Intelligence of the Emotions

The Last Thing is, Don’t Start with Safety

Is Risk and Safety Perfectionism a Disorder?

Chronic Unease is Not Enough

The Shock of Homeostasis

Vision Can’t Come from Safety Compliance

I Wasn’t Thinking Mr Spock

7 Incredible Ways To Diagnose Risk More Effectively

EGO is not a dirty word

What Safety and Risk Could Learn From Patch Adams

Complacency and The Wayward Mind

The Curse of Dataism

How Workers Really Make Decisions

Perfectionism in Safety and the Denial of Humanity

Workshop – Introduction to the Social Psychology of Risk

Desensitization, Statistics and the Psychic Numbing of Numerics

Real Risk – Free Download

Who is Responsible?

Freedom in Necessity

More Posts from this Category

Paperwork

https://vimeo.com/162034157?loop=0

Due Diligence

https://vimeo.com/162493843?loop=0

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.