Attributional bias

The next section of this chapter introduces another means of reducing distress. It is a phenomenon that has particular implications for safety. In the aftermath of an injury or near hit, it can distort reports and incident analyses. This results in inappropriate or less-than-optimal suggestions for corrective action. This phenomenon of attributional bias can also create communication barriers between people and limit the co-operative participation needed to achieve a Total Safety Culture. 

Think back to the anecdote at the start of this chapter. I suggested that Judy s near-hit report was incomplete or biased. Specifically, Judy did not report the potential influence of her own 

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Other charges from opponents of psychedelic therapy have attributed bias and excessive enthusiasm to workers with the drugs. Certainly, some of the early papers were extravagant, as tends to happen with new therapies. But the time has long passed when psychedelics could be hailed as a panacea and... 

The evaluation study will determine the attributes (bias, precision, specificity, limits of detection) of the immunoassay. Bias testing (systematic error) will be conducted by measuring recoveries of the analyte added to matrices of interest. Replicate analysis will be performed on blind replicates or split levels (e.g., Youden pairs). A minimum number of replicates will be performed to provide statistically meaningful results. The number of replicates will be determined by the intended purpose of the immunoassay as well as the documented method performance of the comparative method. 

The concept of "attribution " is introduced as a cognitive process we use to turn stressors into positive stress or negative distress. Attribution bias can reduce distress, but it can also prevent a constructive analysis of an injury or property damage incident. This chapter explains the ben ts and liabilities of such bias and shows its role in shifting stress to distress or vice versa. 

Most people find a healthy imbalance between internal (personal) and external control. They essentially believe, "Tm responsible for the good things tiiat happen to me, but bad luck or imcontrollable factors are responsible for the bad things" (Beck, 1991 Taylor, 1989). Thus, people are apt to attribute injuries to rotten luck and beyond their control, especially when they happen to them. (Recall our discussion of attributional bias in Chapter 6). This... 

Delta function response - Over most of the wavelengths of interest, optical and infrared detectors produce one photoelectron for every detected photon, which provides a one-to-one correspondence between detected photons and photoelectrons. This means that the detector response is exactly linear to the intensity incident on the detector - an attribute that allows astronomers to precisely remove sky background and electronic bias to accurately measure the intensity of the astronomical object. 

Figure 1(a) shows the etch rates of niobium oxide pillar and Si film, and the etch selectivity of Si to niobium oxide as a function of CI2 concentration. The etch condition was fixed at coil rf power of 500 W, dc-bias to substrate to 300 V and gas pressure of 5 mTorr. As the CI2 concentration increased, the etch rate of niobium oxide pillar gradually decreased while Si etch rate increased. It indicates that the etch mechanism of niobium oxide in Cl2/Ar gas is mainly physical sputtering. As a result, the etch selectivity of Si film to niobium oxide monotonously increased. The effect of coil rf power on the etch rate and etch selectivity was examined as shown in Fig. 1(b). As the coil rf power increased, the etch rates of niobium oxide and Si increased but the etch rate of niobium oxide showed greater increase than that of Si. It is attributed to the increase of ion density with increasing coil rf power. Figure 1 (c)... 

Historical data on the indicator. Existing information on the statistical variation, bias, and other interpretational attributes of potential biological indicators should be examined and considered in the design of a sampling program for assessing trends in mercury bioaccumulation. 

The ISO recommendation [1993] should be followed and accuracy used only as a qualitative term. In case of quantitative characterization (by means of the bias), a problem may appear which is similar to that of precision, namely that a quality criterion is quantified by a measure that has a reverse attribute regarding the property which have to be characterized. If the basic idea of measures can be accepted, which is that a high quality becomes a high value and vice versa, bias is an unsuited measure of accuracy (and trueness). In this sense, accuracy could be defined by means of a measure proposed in the next paragraph. 

Figure 17a shows, as an example, the plateau data-point histograms of T3 at three bias voltages. Each histogram, constructed from more than 1,000 individual traces, reveals a distinct maximum. The peak positions from individual experiments are very reproducible for low bias voltages Vbias < 0-30 V. The broad asymmetric tail region toward higher conductance values is attributed to contributions from... 

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