Personality
and accident proneness
A relatively small number of
people have many accidents (Pheasant, 1991).
Two types:
Pheasant (1991) describes accident proneness in terms of:
· Personal characteristics - such as cognitive abilities and personality traits. He argues that extroverts, for example, have more accidents than introverts. Accident-prone drivers may have what is called field dependence. Psychoanalytic theory can be used to explain accident proneness as a form of withdrawal from a situation. Hill and Trist (1953), have shown that accident-prone workers are also likely to have higher absenteeism than other workers, both being examples of withdrawal behaviour'.
· Transient states, which may be to do with illness or mood. Menstrual periods making women more accident-prone.
Illness is also likely to make people more accident prone, either because they are not physically capable of performing the tasks they are trying to do or because their illness makes them lose concentration. Similarly, mood can have an effect on concentration and a person's ability to think clearly.
Freud gave many examples of unconsciously motivated accidents, notably in ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ (1901). In one, a spurned lover, apparently by accident, stepped in front of a car when he happened to meet the woman in the street, and was killed before her eyes. The fact that some people tend to be accident prone, that is, to have far more than their fair share of accidents, has been extensively documented and much discussed by members of the psychoanalytic schools such as Karl Menninger and Theodor Reik.
Menninger (1938), following Freud, took the view that we sometimes have an unconscious wish to punish ourselves as a kind of penance for some wrongdoing or guilty thought, and that in some guilt laden individuals this can manifest itself quite frequently as accident proneness. The problem, as with most psychoanalytic explanations, is that it is extremely difficult to see how unconscious motivation can be convincingly demonstrated. While the existence of accident proneness is not doubted, it is not easy to find a satisfactory way to test the psychoanalytic explanation against the alternative and prosaic explanation that some people are just a lot more clumsy or inattentive than others.
The person approach is the dominant explanation of accidents, especially in medicine (Reason, 2000). Among the advantages of this approach is the satisfying option of naming and blaming people. Individuals are seen as being free agents with the option of choosing between safe and unsafe behaviours. If something goes wrong, it is obvious that it must be the fault of the individual. Taking this view is clearly in the interests of managers and institutions if they want to avoid institutional responsibility.
Early research into industrial accidents tended to focus on individuals, rather than on systems and practices of operation. Greenwood and Woods (1919) performed some of the earliest research into industrial accidents for the Industrial Fatigue Research Board during World War 1(1914—18). As part of their study, they explored the idea that some individuals are accident-prone, or more likely to have accidents than others. They found statistical distributions of accidents, which seemed to support the idea of accident proneness, and gradually this became accepted as a stable characteristic of certain individuals.
As research developed during the 20th century, the idea of accident-proneness was challenged. Some researchers (for example Arbous and Kerrich, 1951) argued that the initial research had failed to distinguish adequately between the different levels of risk run by people in different jobs. Other researchers performed their own studies and found different outcomes. For example, Adelstein (1952) studied accident rates among railway shunters and found that accidents seemed to occur to anyone and there was no evidence for an accident-prone personality.
Because accidents can occur in all shapes and sizes, it seems unlikely that that we can define a single personality type that makes an individual more likely to experience all of them. The way to look at the issues around the personal approach might be to identify the behaviours or personality traits that are most associated with errors and accidents.
REPEATERS
Hill and Inst (1962) investigated accident repeaters. While accidents at work may happen to anyone, it is clear that they occur more frequently with some people than with others. Hill and Trist suggested that this might be seen in terms of group norms and compliance — or rather, a refusal to be compliant. On investigating absenteeism and accident rates in a steel works in the early 1950s, they found that strong social norms operated as to which types of absenteeism were acceptable and which were not. Absences which had been certified (for example by a sick note) were regarded as acceptable; unexpected ones and those due to accidents were not. Consequently, the researchers argued, the ‘accident repeaters’ were actually showing a form of withdrawal from work and a refusal to comply with group norms. It should be noted, though, that an attempted replication of these findings with workers in a photographic process plant failed to produce the same observations (Castle, 1956).
The objective
of this study was to identify determinants of road user behaviour and accident involvement
with the aim of developing effective accident
countermeasures. Examining relationships between personality, risky driving
and involvement in accidents can open up the possibility of early
identification of those more likely to be involved in accidents. The aim is not
to influence personality as such, but to develop measures constructed
for specific groups. The results are based on a self-completion questionnaire
survey carried out among a sample of Norwegian drivers in year 2000 and 2001
(n=2,605; mean age 45.0 yrs). The Norwegian Directorate of Public Roads
financed the study. The questionnaire included measures of risky driving, accident involvement,
normlessness, sensation-seeking, locus of control and driver anger. Results
showed that those who scored high on sensation seeking, normlessness and driver
anger reported more frequent risky driving compared to those who scored low on
these variables. They were more often involved in both speeding and ignorance
of traffic rules. Respondents involved in risk taking-behaviour experienced
near-accidents and crashes leading to both injuries and material damage more
often than other drivers. Iversen,-Hilde; Rundmo,-Torbjoern Personality-and-Individual-Differences. 2002 Dec; Vol 33(8):
1251-1263
TYPE A BEHAVIOUR PATTERN
One of the personality characteristics that has attracted some attention is the Type A behaviour pattern. It might be that the time urgency of the Type A pattern leads people into risky situations. The existence of the Type A person is very controversial, though some people believe that the Type A is more disease prone and more likely to have accidents (Suls et aI., 1988). There has been some work looking at whether Type A behaviours in drivers increase their accident risk — for example a study of Italian police drivers (Magnavita, 1997) found that drivers with the Type A behaviours had a greater risk of traffic accidents.
An examination of the Type A behaviour pattern raises the question of whether accidents can be reduced by careful personnel selection. Jones and Wuebker (1988) describe how a personnel inventory can be used to predict a number of accident-related events. Using the questionnaire they were able to identify high-risk individuals on the basis of their attitudes and personality, and to place them in less hazardous positions, or send them on special safety training programmes.
INTROVERSION AND EXTROVERSION
Injury data collected over a 12-year period from 171 fire-fighters from a city in the US found that personality traits, including introversion, were related to higher injury rates on the job (Liao et al. 2001). They suggested that introverts were less likely to call for assistance, and as fire-fighting requires a high degree of teamwork, it might be that the less integrated and sociable members of the team exposed themselves to greater personal risks. Another finding of the study was that women fire-fighters reported 33 per cent more injuries than their male colleagues, although they returned to work more quickly after injury than the men. The research points to another factor that might contribute to accidents, and that is male culture. They suggested that within groups of male fire-fighters there is a strong cultural norm for not reporting minor injuries because it might be seen as a sign of weakness.
The study of the fire-fighters is particularly interesting because the general view in psychology is that extroversion is the characteristic that is associated with accidents. Extroversion is associated with being impulsive and this has been found to be a feature in people who have car accidents, and accidents at work (Furnham and Heaven, 1999). These apparently contradictory findings illustrate how personality characteristics can interact with the situation someone is in, and the type of task they are asked to carry out, so as to produce an unsafe environment.
The aim of the
present study was to investigate the relationship between extraversion,
neuroticism and psychoticism, and road traffic fatalities in a data set of 34
nations. In addition to traffic fatalities per 100,000 vehicles, work-related
fatalities were included in the study. Results showed that extraversion had a
positive relation to the number of traffic fatalities whereas neuroticism
correlated negatively with road fatalities. Occupational fatalities were
strongly related to deaths on the roads but not to personality dimensions.
Countries with high extraversion scores had more traffic fatalities than
countries with moderate or low extraversion scores. The need for well-designed
studies investigating the link between personality factors and
traffic accident liability via driver behaviour was
expressed. Lajunen,-Timo Personality-and-Individual-Differences. 2001 Dec; Vol 31(8):
1365-1373
AGE
Age is associated with accidents in a number of ways. First, it influences the number and severity of the hazards individuals are exposed to. Second, it is connected to the competence that individuals have at particular tasks, such as crossing the road, and also their skills and attitudes. Children and older people are at the greatest risk of accidents as pedestrians, and they are also at the greatest risk of falls, though for different reasons. In children, the judgement of depth and speed is not fully developed and they may well be unaware of some dangers. For the older person, the problem is limited mobility or failing eyesight. The third problem for the young and old with accidents concerns their ability to respond to and recover from injury (Donaldson and Donaldson, 2000).
PROBLEMS WITH THE PERSON APPROACH
Some accidents can be put down to human error or carelessness or whatever, but many cannot, and following this approach does not offer much advice on how to improve accident rates. Research into quality lapses in the maintenance of aeroplanes found that 90 per cent of them were blameless. If we want to reduce risk, it is important to encourage a culture where errors, slips and near-misses are reported, and a culture where people are named and blamed is not likely to do this. It is believed that the absence of a reporting culture in the Soviet Union contributed to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Two explosions blew the 1 000-tonne concrete cap off one of the nuclear reactors and released molten core fragments into the surrounding countryside and radioactive material into the atmosphere. This entirely manmade disaster killed more than 30 people at the time, damaged the health of thousands, and contaminated over 400 square miles (Reason, 1990).
Another weakness of the person approach is that two features of human error tend to be overlooked. First, it is often the best people who make the worst mistakes (Reason, 2000). Second, mishaps are not random but tend to occur in patterns.
Philip Banyard, 2002, Psychology in Practice, Hodder & Stoughton, 0-340-84496-5