Lecture
In our country an organizational-subject approach to the study and prevention of occupational injury took shape. Its essence lay in the thorough study not only of the worker with an elevated number of injuries, but also of the professional activity of trades and production sites prone to injury, and of problems in the organization of labor and production.
This approach pointed to the inadequacy of the psychotechnical approach to combating injury when viewed solely from the standpoint of traumatogenic psychophysiological traits. Traumatogenic traits are revealed only as critical indicators of fitness for given working conditions. Researchers' attention to the problem of the psychotechnical study of and struggle against injury under conditions of heavy industry shifted toward the rationalization of the labor and production process. Material for rationalization was gathered in the course of studying labor and its conditions, and analysis of hazardous situations was also drawn upon. The system of measures for combating injury included, alongside occupational selection, safety promotion, rationalization of the workplace and the means of labor, and vocational training.
S. G. Gellerstein, head of the department of labor psychology at the Moscow Institute of Labor Protection, who had worked on this problem back in the 1920s, believed that the influence of personal qualities on the labor process and its safety should be studied in direct connection with professional activity. He pointed out that in doing so one must take into account not only the actual data of the individual's personality, but also "the combination of her potential capacities and inherent tendencies, taken in their concrete historical content, that is, in the process of the formation of a professional type" . Thus, professional fitness, for example for driving occupations, was determined primarily by the capacity for safe driving.
The Ural psychotechnician I. L. Tsfasman believed that "the causes of accidents and mishaps lie not in the person, but in the organization of the interaction between the working person and the technical environment" . He called the psychology of injury "the most distorted, most confused chapter of psychotechnics." He proposed viewing the causes of these distortions from the standpoint of understanding professional behavior as the sum of the action of two factors — the human being and the technical environment — and attempting to calculate the special role of each of them. In reality, however, mishaps and accidents are often the result of the simultaneous action of many causes which together created the conditions for that mishap's occurrence.
Tsfasman proposed a model of the occurrence of an accident as a consequence of unexpected changes either in the state and operation of the technical environment, or of changes arising in a person's professional activity. He outlined a scale of hazardous situations by the degree of their demands on the person. If the demands of the situation are too high, a catastrophe occurs; if the demands of the situation are minimal, then the accident is judged solely as the person's fault.
Hence the conclusion followed: the degree of danger could be reduced either by easing the demands placed on a person or by increasing the person's ability to meet these demands. In the first case, safety was achieved through the reconstruction of the technical environment itself; in the second — through the means of industrial psychology.
In the 1930s, in Soviet psychology, thanks to the research of L. S. Vygotsky, S. L. Rubinstein, A. N. Leontiev and other scholars, the view took hold that personal qualities develop and are formed in activity under the direct influence of the social environment. Consequently, a person's degree of protection, or conversely propensity for danger, is not so much an innate quality as the result of such development.
To understand the origin of an accident, evidently, it was not enough to have even the most detailed data on the individual qualities of the injured person. Here one also needed to know the features of the professional activity, the specific working conditions in which the incident arose, since the psychophysiological qualities of the worker have a stronger effect on his injury rate the more acute the overall situation is from the standpoint of danger. This position was later confirmed by the work of the Soviet psychologist V. D. Nebylitsyn, in which it was shown that shortcomings in a person's individual qualities are far from manifesting themselves in all work tasks, and that it is precisely in extreme situations that the weaknesses of a person's traits, in particular the traits of his nervous system, come especially clearly to the surface.
In the works of twentieth-century Soviet psychotechnicians, the individual qualities directly affecting labor safety were defined by the concept of the "personal factor in accident rate," by which was understood the totality of all the psychological and physical properties of the individual that could be connected with an incident. Under such an explanation, this concept defines only a narrow range of an individual's negative qualities (mainly of a psychological kind) that contribute to the occurrence of an accident. In fact, however, the role of the person in an accident is significantly broader. At present some authors (G. T. Beregovoy, N. D. Zavalova and others) have concluded that it is more expedient to use the concept of the "human factor," which can include the complex of all qualities of the individual, including physiological ones, affecting a given incident, and to examine these qualities from the standpoint of their interaction with the machinery being operated.
The causes of hazardous situations and occupational injuries connected with the human factor can be arranged according to the following levels:
• the level of the individual (congenital or temporarily or permanently acquired physiological and psychological characteristics);
Production activity is a process in which factors of the external environment and features of the human organism are intertwined. Therefore, in analyzing hazardous situations it is necessary to consider the human—habitat system as a whole. For example, factors causing a temporary propensity for an accident, and the age and length of service of the injured person, have repeatedly been noted. In analyzing injury rates at gas industry enterprises, it has been observed that injury rate has two peaks: among young workers and among persons with more than 10—15 years of service.
The factors of youth and lack of professional experience at the start of mastering an occupation account for the highest level of injury in the first year of work. This is connected with the worker's inexperience: a lack of knowledge, an inability to diagnose a hazardous situation and determine the possible consequences of an error made, and to react quickly and find correct decisions in complex situations. As length of service increases, the number of accidents, as a rule, declines.
The second peak in injury rate is explained, firstly, by the decline in physiological and psychological functions connected with the aging process, which affects the precision and accuracy of work performed, and secondly, by a disdainful attitude toward safety rules as a result of adaptation to danger. "Secondary carelessness" is the name given to the state, formed under the influence of experience, that leads to violations of safety rules. Age and length of service cannot, by themselves, be the cause of an accident, but they can be additional conditions for the emergence of a hazardous situation, that is, they can be prerequisites for an occupational injury.
A temporary propensity for an accident may be connected with some negative experience, with a memory of the past. An accident once experienced can produce a residual psychological effect that increases susceptibility to danger. A person who was injured at some phase of the work process may constantly experience, as that phase approaches, an overwhelming feeling of fear, and along with it uncertainty, which leads to errors and the repetition of the accident. These prerequisites, or indirect causes, begin to act relatively steadily even before the accident occurs, since they become the backdrop of hazardous behavior.
Of great importance in the formation of a behavioral model is the social and physical impunity of a worker who commits hazardous actions. Physical impunity arises from the fact that an incorrect action, in certain cases, is not accompanied by injury. The person believes that the probability of being injured is so small that it can be disregarded. Social impunity is often the consequence of the fact that colleagues and superiors take an indulgent attitude toward the violation, believing that the output obtained compensates for such trifles as a violation of occupational safety instructions. Such impunity fosters disregard for danger and a false belief among workers in their own personal invulnerability.
Under circumstances identical for all workers, the decisive role in shaping each individual person's pattern of behavior is played by his individual qualities, reflecting a combination of physiological and socio-psychological traits, such as type of nervous system, temperament, character, features of thinking, education, experience, upbringing, and health.
Specialists in the field of labor psychology identify the following reasons for the conscious violation of safety rules:
The causes of safety-rule violations leading to an emergency situation and injury are, in essence, directed toward a single goal — seeking the nearest permissible and easiest ways of satisfying the needs that gave rise to them.
It becomes clear that, for all the undoubted importance of objective conditions (working conditions, interests, hazardous situations), the decisive role in reducing occupational injury and accident rates is played by the activation of the human factor in the sphere of labor protection.
Comments