Lecture
Research into the influence of an individual's personal qualities on the safety of his labor has been conducted since the beginning of the 20th century. Their analysis shows that this problem was examined within different psychological schools of thought.
The German scientist K. Marbe, a representative of the Würzburg school of psychology, was one of the first to conduct an experimental study of the influence of an individual's personal qualities on accidents. According to Marbe, the entire conscious side of a person's life — feeling, thinking, action — is a continuous manifestation of his set, which determines the direction of attention, representations, and the results of activity. He divided sets into two types: voluntary and involuntary.
Marbe believed that when a person aims to perform a particular activity, he develops a voluntary set. An involuntary set arises independently of the person. For example, when solving similar tasks, after a series of successive successes a person develops an involuntary set toward another success. It follows that in a person's task-related activity there may arise periods of good and poor results, determined respectively by a positive or negative set. Evidently, there must be transitions, switches, between different sets.
On the basis of her experiments, M. Zilling, a colleague in Marbe's laboratory, found that the ability of different people to change or switch sets is far from the same. Thus, it was observed that some subjects worked better under conditions where constant requirements applied (they had poor switchability), while others (with good set-switchability) worked better under changing requirements. There were people whose good (or poor) ability to switch sets appeared only in certain areas, or changed depending on the requirements placed on the activity. It turned out that the ability to switch sets did not correlate with indicators of intelligence level or work capacity, and did not depend on speed qualities.
Building on all these theoretical premises, Marbe examined questions of occupational safety, reasoning as follows. In the course of work, a person faces a variety of tasks requiring corresponding switches of set. Such rapid switches are especially needed when unforeseen tasks, unexpected obstacles, or dangers arise. Such tasks are precisely characteristic of emergency situations, and successfully resolving them requires a good ability to switch sets. Marbe drew the following conclusions:
Marbe attempted to confirm his theoretical conclusions with his own experimental data. He studied the recurrence of accidents on the basis of an analysis of injury data for three thousand servicemen over a ten-year period. First, their injury rate over the first five years was examined.
On the basis of the results obtained, all the subjects were divided into three groups:
Injury rates in these same groups were then assessed over the following five years. It turned out that during these years the first group had 763 accidents, the second — 817, and the third — 840. By means of simple arithmetic calculations, Marbe determined the average number of injuries per person in each group. In the first group, for each of its members this came to
0.52 injuries. In the third group, where the preceding five years had shown the highest number of accidents per person, the following five years also showed 2.5 times more accidents than in the first group. In these results Marbe saw proof of the correctness of his theoretical conclusions.
On the basis of all this data, Marbe concluded that the ability to switch sets is an innate natural quality of a person. He believed that training and experience could only somewhat "soften" a natural predisposition to accidents, but could in no way eliminate it. Thus, Marbe's theory asserted that certain people are born with a natural predisposition to accidents, which will inevitably manifest itself no matter what they do in the future.
In evaluating the work of Marbe and his followers, it is important to note that their research focused attention on the personal factor in accidents. They showed that an accident cannot be regarded either as a random event caused solely by an external stimulus situation, or as the result of a reflexive reaction to that situation. The accident, for the first time, appeared as an event conditioned by the psychophysiological qualities of the victim. From this it followed quite definitely that the widespread opinion of the time — that the problem of occupational safety could be solved solely by improving equipment and working conditions — was mistaken.
S. Freud believed that accidents are generated by the victims themselves and are the product of their unconscious manifestations, functioning as a kind of internal protest by the individual against the social, family, and other restrictions imposed on him. According to Freud, a person injures himself not by chance, but under the influence of unconscious aggressive impulses inherent in him from birth. The conclusions of psychoanalytic theory on this issue essentially coincided with Marbe's conclusions that accidents originate from the workers themselves, are the result of shortcomings in their personal factor, and will occur regardless of working conditions.
The German engineer K. Tramm identified a set of "mental qualities" necessary for a driver's safe work (attention, the ability to make decisions and react quickly, presence of mind, good eyesight and hearing, joint sensitivity, fine discrimination of movement speed, good memory, the ability to resist fatigue, and the ability to work with technology). Selecting drivers based on an assessment of these qualities allowed, as the author notes, more than halving the number of road accidents over two years.
Another line of research consisted in studying reports on accidents. Its founders were the English physician W. Anderson and the German psychologist O. Selz. On the basis of studying reports on 58 aircraft accidents at an English flying club, Anderson concluded that every accident teaches something new, and these lessons must be used to avoid accidents in the future.
M. Greenwood and H. Woods, staff members of the English Industrial Fatigue Research Board, analyzing the causes of accidents at a factory producing military uniforms, put forward a number of hypotheses:
If the first hypothesis were confirmed, then occupational safety would have to be improved mainly through improving equipment and protective devices, as well as through improving the organization of production and reducing fatigue. If the second hypothesis were confirmed, it would be necessary, after an accident occurred, to transfer the victim, at least temporarily, to safer work. In the third case, the task arose of developing methods of occupational selection and early diagnosis of workers' susceptibility to hazards. The validity of the hypotheses put forward was tested on the basis of an analysis of the statistical distribution curves of accidents. The authors concluded that the third hypothesis was valid, that is, that workers have differing individual susceptibility to hazards. The studies also showed that workers who were injured more often had worse scores on a test of sensorimotor coordination.
The authors of these studies, summarizing the data obtained, emphasized the idea that predisposition to accidents should be regarded not simply as a function of the worker's individual psychological qualities, but also as the result of the combination of these qualities with specific production conditions.
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