Three Recurrent Biases in Relation to Human Error

Three Recurrent Biases in Relation to Human Error 

The study of human error is riddled with bias. Three forms of bias are particularly significant reconstruction after a setback, excessive attribution of error causality to front-line operators, and inaccurate links between errors and accidents. 

Industrial disasters have played a major part in generating the fascination for studying human faults and human errors. Without the nuclear industry and its disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and more recently at Fukushima, without the aviation industry and the accident in Tenerife, and without the Bhopal disaster in the chemical industry, very little progress would have been made towards theories on error, safety and human reliability. 

On the other hand, the knowledge of errors that is available has been used particularly intensively in work on safety in complex systems, but this has not always been successful due to the many contradictions or imperfections that arise when making the transition from theory to practice. 

Despite, or because of, this profusion of fashionable literature in which any assertion can be supported or contradicted, there are three recurring types of bias that have become established in the use of accident analysis in industry. 

---