Implicit social cognition and safety culture

Abstract

Most models define safety culture as basic assumptions, attitudes, or values concerning organizational safety issues. When measuring safety cultures, many researchers have had their main focus on explicit safety‐critical attitudes and generally relied on specific survey instruments. It is questionable, however, whether self‐report measures can capture all aspects of organizational safety culture. Instead of getting direct answers, implicit measures rely on activating automatic attitudes derived from long‐term memory and measure the time it takes an individual to react to attitude‐evoking stimuli. This article deals with the relationship between implicit safety‐critical attitudes and safety culture. The first study involved the measurement of explicit and implicit safety‐critical attitudes from 376 participants working in various industries. The Implicit Association Test (IAT)—a latency‐based measurement approach—was applied to assess implicit safety‐critical attitudes. Explicit safety attitudes were measured by questionnaire. Implicit and explicit attitudes are both related to organizational safety performance indicators, such as data concerning accidents and near misses. The second study involved both types of safety‐critical attitudes that were used for predicting safety culture indicators on an individual level. An example of this is risk awareness. The first study's results show that explicit and implicit safety‐critical attitudes represent various aspects of an organizational safety culture and can be related to safety performance indicators on an organizational level. The second study's results indicate that implicitly measured attitudes have been better at predicting safety culture indicators on an individual level compared to explicit attitude. Recommendations for future research in the field of safety culture assessment are made. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Controlled versus Automatic Processes: Which Is Dominant to Safety? The Moderating Effect of Inhibitory Control

“…Since safety is a sensitive issue in a safety-priority organization, when asked directly, employees may be more likely to report the importance of safety [22], [23]. In indirect measures, participants have no control of the measurement outcome [43]; thus, response biases can be avoided to some extent [30].…”

Situation awareness, human error, and organizational learning in sociotechnical systems

“…As can be seen in Table , the SAPT scale, which represents an overall indicator of the workers’ task specific SA about error causation, correlates significantly with individual dimensions such as lack of knowledge ( r = 0.52, p < 0.001), lack of awareness ( r = 0.54, p < 0.001) complacency ( r = 0.56, p < 0.001), and lack of communication ( r = 0.41, p < 0.001), whereas none of the other dimensions revealed significant correlations. The four significant correlations can be estimated as moderate (Marquardt et al, ). All statistical tests were adjusted according to the Bonferroni correction for multiple significance testing ( α′ = α/13 = 0.003).…”

“…Because of the general character of the “Dirty Dozen Error” categories, a transfer from aviation to other industry contexts was fairly easy. Most of these error categories also occur in many other industries such as medicine (Marquardt, Treffenstädt, Gerstmeyer, & Gades‐Buettrich, ), chemical industry, timber industry, or metal industry (Marquardt, Gades, & Robelski, ). Because the questionnaire has got a generic character, no readapting to this different kind of industry was required.…”

The Diagnosis of Communication and Trust in Aviation Maintenance (DiCTAM) Model

“…A better understanding of human factors has become imperative within aviation and several models and systems have been introduced and implemented in the continuous attempt to predict and reduce human error. In aviation maintenance, there are twelve factors identified as the principal preconditions or conditions, that contribute to human error, widely known as the Dupont's Dirty Dozen [17,18,[50][51][52][53]. These elements are dissimilar in nature and appear either on personal, group or organizational performance levels [54].…”