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

SafetyRisk.net

Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk

  • Home
    • About
      • Privacy Policy
      • Contact
  • FREE
    • Slogans
      • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
      • When Slogans Don’t Work
      • CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
      • 500 OF THE BEST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2023
      • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
      • COVID-19 (Coronavirus, Omicron) 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 2023
      • 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
    • FREE SAFETY eBOOKS
    • Free Hotel and Resort Risk Management Checklist
    • 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
  • Social Psychology Of Risk
    • What is Psychological Health and Safety at Work?
    • 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
  • Dr Long Posts
    • ALL 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!
  • THEMES
    • Risk Myths
    • Safety Myths
    • Safety Culture Silences
    • Safety Culture
    • Psychological Health and Safety
    • Zero Harm
    • Due Diligence
  • Free Learning
    • Introduction to SPoR – Free
    • FREE RISK and SAFETY EBOOKS
    • FREE ebook – Guidance for the beginning OHS professional
    • Free EBook – Effective Safety Management Systems
    • Free EBook – Lessons I Have Learnt
  • Psychological Safety
    • What is Psychological Health and Safety at Work?
    • Managing psychosocial hazards at work
    • Psychological Safety – has it become the next Maslow’s hammer?
    • What is Psychosocial Safety
    • Psychological Safety Slogans and Quotes
    • What is Psychological Safety?
    • Understanding Psychological Terminology
    • Psycho-Social and Socio-Psychological, What’s the Difference?
    • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures
    • It’s not weird – it’s a psychological safety initiative!
You are here: Home / Social Psychology of Risk / The Sully Effect

The Sully Effect

December 2, 2016 by Dr Rob Long 2 Comments

The Sully Effect

imageI wrote recently about the Bradbury Effect that is, the delusion that there is no chance, luck, randomness and fundamental attribution error. A critical part of the Bradbury effect is the attribution of value to denial in the light of hindsight bias. It’s amazing how smart we become as humans when we are not in ‘the moment’. Another example of this is The Sully Effect.

The story of Sully is about the Miracle on the Hudson . For those who have watched the movie it is about how engineers and bureaucrats (after the event) seek to find cause and rational reasons for the decisions of the Captain Chesley Sullenberger, Sully. The movie effectively demonises the enquiry and the NTSB investigators (http://qz.com/778011/sully-ntsb-investigators-are-not-happy-about-being-made-the-villains-in-clint-eastwoods-film-starring-tom-hanks-as-chesley-sully-sullenberger/).

The Sully Effect demonstrates the power of heuristics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic) and implicit knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge) in decision making. This is how we all make decisions most of the time. The idea that decision making is both rational and like a checklist is a nonsense in light of the evidence. Humans simply couldn’t live if every decision was about rationality (see further One Brain Three Minds https://vimeo.com/106770292) This doesn’t mean that human decisions are irrational but rather, most of our decisions are arational (non-rational). That is, we decide using ‘fast and frugal’ processes (neither rational or irrational) built on experience such as with heuristics and implicit knowledge (the best to read further on this is Gerd Giggerenzer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Gigerenzer ). In the pace of this world (Moore-Ede, M., 1993 The Twenty-Four Hour Society) there are countless examples of how major disasters have been averted by heuristics thinking and fast and frugal (collective) decision making (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seDPVqQKORE ).

Implicit or tacit knowledge (through heuristics) is not really about knowing by feeling but rather a form of knowing that resides in the unconscious and surfaces when millisecond decision-making is required. This is what the story of Sully is about.

Heuristics and implicit knowledge operate from the unconscious. When we say we made a decision ‘without thinking’ that is exactly right. Most of the time this form of unconscious decision making keeps us perfectly safe. Some also know this as auto-pilot (automaticity – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaticity) What we really mean is, we made a decision without rationally thinking. We do this individually and collectively. It is in the collective unconscious that cultures and organisations collectively support group heuristics and tacit knowledge. This is what happened in the cockpit with Sully and crew.

What the Sully Effect also highlights is the post-event (rational) intelligence of those who have the luxury of hindsight and time. I have seen this time and time again in the various crises I have been involved in (eg. Beaconsfield, Canberra Bushfires). The idea that people collectively make unconscious decisions is really not the domain of engineers, safety people and bureaucrats and this surfaces always in post event investigations. (The SEEK Program (next available in Melbourne in June 2017 http://cllr.com.au/product/seek-the-social-psyvhology-of-event-investigations-unit-2/) tackles such problems in investigations and provides new tools in understanding how decisions are really made.)

It is in post-investigation that all the lovers of measurement surface, yet in the moment of a crisis, there is no time to measure, reflect or ponder. Most safety investigations work under this crazy assumption that decision-making is like using a checklist – individual and rational, totally ignoring the social-psychological realities of decision making. Then when someone like Sully succeeds by such decision making they are lauded as a hero, but if anything goes wrong they get crucified, and so by rational standards they are labelled ‘an idiot’.

Of course there is no education of this in any orthodox safety curriculum (https://www.safetyrisk.net/isnt-it-time-we-reformed-the-whs-curriculum/). WHS is still plagued by pyramids, swiss cheese and curves. The WHS curriculum keeps the safety non-profession locked into a rationalist/reductionist time warp (read Dekker Safety Differently), so removed from the reality of decision making that it remains irrelevant to the rest of the workplace. Safety still thinks ‘safety is a choice you make’, that ‘all injury is avoidable’, that dumb-down is good and speaks in perfectionist language (zero).

If you want to learn more about human judgment and decision-making and the collective unconscious in cultural decision making, then you might want to join in on the Introduction to the Social Psychology of Risk workshops being undertaken in January, February and March 2017 (Europe, Sydney and Adelaide).

Linz Austria Workshop 17,18 January 2017

http://cllr.com.au/product/international-workshop-introduction-social-psychology-risk/

Sydney Workshop 8,9,10 February 2017

http://cllr.com.au/product/an-introduction-to-the-social-psychology-of-risk-unit-1/

Adelaide Workshop 8,9,10 March 2017

Flyer to be available soon, for more information:

Contact admin@cllr.com.au

  • 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)

  • Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual) - January 23, 2023
  • Thinking of Mortality - January 23, 2023
  • Safety is the Wrong Anchor - January 23, 2023
  • Foresight Blindness, Hindsight Bias and Risk - January 23, 2023
  • Getting the Balance Right in Tackling Risk - January 23, 2023
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 a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Social Psychology of Risk Tagged With: arational, unconscious

Reader Interactions

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

Primary Sidebar

Search and Discover More on this Site

Never miss a post - Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,497 other subscribers

Introduction to SPOR – FREE!!

SAFETY MYTHS SERIES

The Mythic Symbology of Safety

Posture Myths and Holistic Ergonomics

Safety Mythbusters

Don’t Be Emotional! Another Safety Myth

Tackling the Challenge of Heuristics in Safety

The Myth of Normal

NEW! Free Download

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Recent Comments

  • Rob Long on Posture Myths and Holistic Ergonomics
  • Linda McKendry on Posture Myths and Holistic Ergonomics
  • Rob long on Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Matt Thorne on Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Anonymous on Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Jason on How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Rob Long on How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Admin on How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Rob Long on 400,000 Free Downloads
  • Gustavo Saralegui on 400,000 Free Downloads
  • Rob long on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Wynand on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Rob Long on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • simon cassin on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Rob Long on Records of safety activities: evidence of safety or non-compliance?
  • Matt Thorne on Free Online Workshops
  • Rob long on No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Brian Edwin Darlington on No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Risk Diversity on Book Launch – For the Love of Zero – in Portuguese
  • Rob Long on No Good Reason to Follow Reason

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Footer

VIRAL POST – The Risk Matrix Myth

Top Posts & Pages. Sad that most are so dumb but this is what safety luves

  • 500 OF THE BEST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2023
  • Free Safety Moments and Toolbox Talk Examples, Tips and Resources
  • Road Safety Slogans 2023
  • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
  • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • Safety Acronyms
  • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
  • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS, CHECKISTS, REGISTERS, TEMPLATES and APPS
  • 15 Safety Precautions When Working With Electricity
  • SAFETY IMAGES, Photos, Unsafe Pictures and Funny Fails

Recent Posts

  • Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Thinking of Mortality
  • Safety is the Wrong Anchor
  • Foresight Blindness, Hindsight Bias and Risk
  • Getting the Balance Right in Tackling Risk
  • What is SPoR?
  • How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Afraid to Let Go of What Doesn’t Work in Safety
  • When You Don’t Know What to do in Safety, Have Another Blitz!!!
  • Gloves and Glasses Compliance
  • A Case of Desensitisation – What Would You Do?
  • How to Leave the Safety Industry
  • The Mythic Symbology of Safety
  • Dark Waters, The True Story of DuPont and Zero
  • 400,000 Free Downloads
  • Am I stupid? I didn’t think of that…
  • Don’t Look Now Safety, Your Metaphor is Showing
  • Ratio Delusions and Heinrich’s Hoax
  • To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Culture as a Wicked Problem, for Safety
  • Safety Leadership Training
  • Cultural Orientation in Risk
  • The Stanford Experiment and The Social Psychology of Risk
  • Objectivity, Audits and Attribution When Calculating Risk
  • Records of safety activities: evidence of safety or non-compliance?
  • Zero, The Seeking of Infinity
  • Safety Leadership Essentials
  • What Can Indiana Jones Tell Us About Culture
  • Safety as a Worldview
  • The Loathing of Limits
  • Culture Cannot be Framed Through Safety
  • Free Online Workshops
  • Safety Culture–Hudson’s Model
  • Book Launch – For the Love of Zero – in Portuguese
  • Advancing Backwards in Safety
  • The ‘Noise’ of Safety, Silence and Practicing of Mindfulness
  • All Things Must Pass in Risk
  • I’m just not that into safety anymore
  • Sticks and Stones and the Nonsense of Zero Harm
  • Courting Infallibility in Safety
  • Indicators of Risk
  • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
  • No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Just as Well Culture Doesn’t Listen to Safety
  • What Are the Benefits Of Social Psychology of Risk?
  • Short-Sighted Lenses by Safety
  • Is Safety the Empire of Non-Sense?
  • No Wonder Safety is Confused About Culture
  • Building High Performance Safety Cultures
  • Understanding iCue, a Visual, Verbal, Semiotic Method for Tackling Risk

VIRAL POST!!! HOW TO QUIT THE SAFETY INDUSTRY

FEATURED POSTS

The Safety Worldview and the Worldview of Safety, Testing Due Diligence

Post Graduate Diploma in Psychology of Risk Commences

The Real Barriers to Safety

Safety, Ethics, SPoR and How to Foster the Abuse of Power

Learning Styles Matter

Semiotics, Semiology and Safety Sense

New Year Safety Trade-Offs and By-Products

Adversarialism and the Politicisation of Safety

Can There be a Feminist Safety?

What in the (Risk & Safety) World is Imagination?

Free Poster–What is Safety

Learning Wisdom from the Collective Unconscious

Complacency and The Wayward Mind

The Unconscious and the Soap Dispenser

Is Safety the Empire of Non-Sense?

Anchoring, Framing and Priming Risk

Safety Leadership Training

Safety for True Believers

Social Psychology of Risk Challenge

Safety Superstitions

Independent Thinking in an Uncertain World, A Mind of One’s Own

Pascal’s Wager and Sacred Safety

I am a Spreadsheet King

Psycho-social workplace issues

The Bias of Method Design in Risk

We Are Such Experts….

Safety is the Wrong Anchor

Expecting the Unexpected

Getting the Balance Right in Tackling Risk

Post Graduate Studies in the Social Psychology of Risk

A Masters Degree in ‘Tick and Flick’

Risk You Can Eat

Please Don’t Try to Fix Me – I’m Not a Machine

SAFETY IS A MYTH, LONG LIVE SAFETY

Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk

The Deficit Focus and Safety Balance

Stop the Train I Want to Get Off

Making Technicians Not Helpers

Psychology of Risk Post Graduate Program Suspended ‘til 2017

Selective Harm for Rio Tinto

More Posts from this Category

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,497 other subscribers

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

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY?

What is Psychological Safety at Work?