05 November 2009
Becky Allen, Tim Marsh

Most biographers choose as their subjects great thinkers and doers: scientists, artists, politicians and philanthropists whose lives have helped shape our own. John Burnham, professor of history at Ohio State University, is a little different. His new book is the biography of an idea: that some people are more accident prone than others.

For such a widely held belief, the idea of accident proneness is surprisingly recent. Born out of the First World War, it was first described in the professional literature by two different psychologists in different countries in the same year, 1925. It was this parallel "discovery" that first interested Burnham.

"Simultaneous discovery suggests that there was something in the intellectual community or the surrounding culture, either a general 'zeitgeist' or a point at which knowledge in some way had reached a state that precipitated an inevitable next step," he explains.

Its proponent in Germany was Karl Marbe, a psychologist with the Würtzburg School, whose interest in the psychology of accidents was piqued by a 1911 train derailment at Müllheim, which demolished the station. At the subsequent court case, Marbe gave evidence that the train's engineer had a history of unreliable behaviour and the guard - who might have stopped the train - did not have the "mental capacity" to make an appropriate judgement, Marbe found.

In the UK, the term was coined by Eric Farmer, a psychologist with the Industrial Fatigue Board, which collected records of accidents in World War One munitions factories. Their data showed "the bulk of the accidents occur to a limited number of individuals who have a special susceptibility to accidents, and suggests that the explanation of this susceptibility is to be found in the personality of the individual". Farmer used the term "accident prone" in the board's 1924 annual report.

Rise and fall

Burnham attributes the rise of the idea to three things: "the existence of statistics, and of psychologists - part of new, fresh discipline anxious to make themselves socially useful, and people in industry who were getting injured at a frightening rate".

From Germany and Britain the idea spread, reaching its peak in the 1950s, but by the latter years of the century it was on the wane as new social forces developed. Once societies became wealthy enough to take safety measures that covered the entire population, this approach eclipsed the idea that some people were more likely to be involved in accidents than others.

According to Burnham: "In the withering away of the idea of accident proneness, it is possible to see the growing dominance of a new social strategy, solving safety problems by controlling the technological environment ... Where once leaders striving for safety had worked to manipulate human beings who might have accidents, by the end of the century, experts and policy makers were engineering safety for everyone by using technological fixes."

"People in health and safety have much more turned to engineering the environment; it's been a major shift," Burnham says. "Moving jobs or firing those who had accidents was common in the early 20th century. One hundred years ago the worker was always blamed, despite dangerous systems of work."

By any name

The idea persists in popular culture, lodged firmly in folklore. By the late 20th century, says Burnham, "the notion of accident prone people had entered into popular thinking, and not even the engineers could make the idea, that some people have a lot more accidents than other people, go away." But has the concept really died a death among psychologists and safety professionals, or has it been renamed and resurrected?

In 2005, psychologists Dr Sharon Clarke of the University of Manchester and Professor Ivan Robertson, managing director of consultancy Robertson Cooper and professor of organisational psychology at Leeds University Business School, looked at 47 previous scientific studies on personality and accidents published between 1947 and 2000.

Their "meta analysis", which included studies as diverse as accident rates among South African bus drivers, US airmen and Australian factory workers, recategorised the personality traits used by the original authors into the most widely accepted system today, the "big five" personality model.

Remembered by the mnemonic OCEAN, the big five personality dimensions are:

• openness
• conscientiousness
• extroversion
• agreeableness
• neuroticism.

Each is a continuum, and someone who scores highly for extroversion, for example, would tend to be more socially dominant, impulsive and excitement-seeking.

Clarke and Robertson found people low in agreeableness and conscientiousness were more likely to be in accidents, and that extroversion was a predictor of traffic accidents.

 "Their analysis is interesting," says Jill Joyce, senior policy and technical advisor at the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH). "It unpacks certain behaviours, such as the link between traffic accidents and extroversion. From a psychological perspective it adds up."

"Their findings on low conscientiousness and low agreeableness make sense," adds Joyce, who has a master's degree in occupational psychology. "The evidence suggests a link between being less self-disciplined and conscientious and being prone to having more accidents. And agreeableness is about working well as a team and getting on with others, so doing your own thing - such as not following procedures - could also make you more likely to have accidents."

But even if remnants of the idea of accident proneness remain, albeit refined according to the big five personality model, what use is this knowledge to safety professionals?

It certainly doesn't mean personality testing is useful for screening employees for most jobs, says Robertson. "We found a relationship, but the question then is, what can you do with that finding? People have knee-jerk reactions and make a lot of assumptions, but our research doesn't mean that you can use selection based on personality to reduce accidents."

He thinks there may be circumstances, high risk situations such as air traffic control, where personality testing could aid selection, but he believes it could be more widely applied in employees' development plans.

"Some worry that people will stop managing the environment and blame the individual, but a bit of constructive input might improve things ... It could provide useful feedback to people about where they could take more care," he says, pointing out there are similar practices in other areas, including customer services and management training.

Joyce agrees. "I wouldn't like to see its use in screening out, for example, extroverts! It doesn't make sense to screen, but making individuals aware about how their personality could affect their work could be useful ... You can't change people's personality, but you can change their behaviour," she says.

The main lesson is that whatever role personality plays in accidents, the big picture is far more important. "It's the combination of certain situations and people in certain situations that increase the risk of an accident ... Any accident is a combination of the person, or people, and the circumstances they work in," says Robertson.

"Personality plays a role, but there are other factors," says Joyce, citing her own research for the Learning and Skills Council into keeping young workers safe.

"We developed a model and piloted it with a group of apprentices. We gave one group more training and supervision. As far as learners went, we found the ability to concentrate, the quality of supervision and role models, the impact of peer pressure and awareness of outcomes were key," she says.

As the recent feature on human error in June's HSW noted, nobody's duty of care is diminished by the susceptibilities of the individuals they have to protect.

Even if it's not a valid idea, the rise and fall of accident proneness offers an insight into society and culture over the past century, and their impact on workplace health and safety.

"The idea of accident proneness illuminates brilliantly the ways in which humans in the West interacted with technology," says Burnham. "Indeed the idea raises fundamental questions about human nature, human equality, and the limits of social discrimination. Most basically, how should social units deal with someone who shows a pattern of inadvertent but sometimes dangerous destructiveness?"

John C. Burnham's Accident Prone is published by the University of Chicago Press, www.press.uchicago.edu/

Categories:
Training, Safety, Professional Skills, Features, Accident reduction