How Do Workers Make Decisions?
This is the question on the tongue of Safety but has no idea of an answer.
I saw a video recently about ‘predicting behaviour in safety’. This was a slick piece of multimedia that probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with executives speaking and sports stars, all wrapped up in the language and discourse of Behaviourism including the nonsense language of ‘inspiration’ and vision’. Nothing in the video was inspirational or visionary.
The Behaviourist has no idea why or how workers make decisions. They talk this silly language of: ‘being in the moment’, ‘mindfulness’, ‘mindsets’, ‘mental state’, ‘performance’, ‘yes on the task’, ‘line of fire’, ‘human error’ and of course ‘behaviours’. With a loaded agenda fully of nonsense language of: ‘complacency’, ‘being careful’, ‘concentration’, ‘100% focus’, ‘having your head in the game’ and ‘super awareness’. The video package was all about ‘learning’ these things as ‘skills’, what utter nonsense! All of this language is meaningless and isn’t even close to understanding how workers make decisions.
The video included no-one with any clue about how the brain-Mind-body works. There were CEOs and GMs sprouting forth on stuff they had no idea about, just more black and white Behaviourist rubbish.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Safety wanted to learn something about how workers make decisions and this involves nothing in the paragraphs written above.
At no place in this video was there any notion of why humans create habits, routines and make 95% of decisions by heuristics, emotions and automaticity. There was no notion of the human unconscious or Collective Unconscious with one commentator talking about voices inside your head! OMG, could Safety get more dumb. BTW, there is no discussion of this in the AIHS BoK either. I can think of no better example of the blind leading the blind.
Once watched this video I was left with the conclusion that workers don’t concentrate, don’t pay attention, have inferior awareness and are mostly complacent. This is what you get when you fuel ignorance with Behaviourist delusion and think you’ve explained how and why workers make decisions. None of this is true or real and is not supported by any research into how the brain-Mind-body works.
95% of all worker decision making is enacted through heuristics, mental shortcuts, routine, emotions, feelings and habit. That’s right 95% of worker decision making is unconscious. The research evidence for this is overwhelming.
Most of the time workers make decisions unconsciously, there is no connection to rational decision making. It is only through the development of heuristics, body memory (https://safetyrisk.net/body-memory-and-safety/ ), muscle memory and social memory that fallible humans can get things done efficiently and quickly. Any idea that decisions are rational or irrational is nonsense. Most decisions are non-rational that is, they don’t involve any weighing up of rational process to get an outcome. Safety is NOT a choice you make (https://safetyrisk.net/why-safety-isnt-a-choice-you-make/).
Workers don’t ‘decide’ what they will do. Workers don’t ‘decide’ to chop their arm off. Workers don’t ‘choose’ safety or un-safety. All of this is silly language of Behaviourism (https://safetyrisk.net/kicking-the-behaviourism-habit/ ; https://safetyrisk.net/the-curse-of-behaviourism/ ) and is an outdated theory that only Safety believes.
If you want to know why and how workers make decisions then ditch the Behaviourist nonsense and start engaging with some of the research into how the brain-Mind-body works. Wouldn’t it be great to see Safety with some vision to stop making these crappy videos that simply make everything worse. All this stuff does is dig a deeper hole for an industry that loves having its head in the sand.
If you want to start that journey in understanding human judgement and decision making then perhaps sign up to the free Introduction to SPoR Module being offered in late November – https://cllr.com.au/product/an-introduction-to-the-social-psychology-of-risk-unit-1-free-online-module/ or access any of the free book downloads here: https://www.humandymensions.com/shop/
Checkout the latest Video by Rob Long (transcript here)
Dr Rob Long
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brian says
I don’t think we will ever see any progress from “safety'” until they concede all the pretentious hype and gobbledegook and begin to accept and understand ‘wicked’ problems. Will probably never happen – too much sunk cost? Reminds me of the Titanic – ‘Full steam ahead ….’
Rob Long says
Sadly Brian you are on the mark. Neither the associations or Regulator will change and continue to perpetuate the problem. Until zero is gone, there will be no change.
Rob Long says
None better than safety to smell the cheese.
Bernard Corden says
PS The mice and Swiss cheese pretty well sums up Safety.
Admin says
BBS lab rats
Bernard Corden says
In his book entitled “No Name in the Street”, the late James Baldwin proclaimed……..“Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”.
Critical thinking is now viewed as an act of stupidity and thoughtlessness is considered a virtue.
Ignorance has become the primary organizing principle of every Western society and any traces of discernment appear only at the margins of its culture.