Why do we blame people for failing to compensate for a poorly designed system?
A cool extract from Baker & Haddon’s 1974 article about people and poor design (in my view, Haddon is among the GOATs).
They argue that ‘traditionally’ (lolz those silly dark age people of yesteryear, not like us modern elites who stopped blaming people…), we’ve emphasised changing human behaviour in response to incidents.
But “The concept of “human error,” however, is much less appropriate than concepts that emphasize the relationship between human capabilities and the complex demands of a task such as driving”.
People are “expected to compensate for any inadequacies of vehicles, highways, or other drivers—that is, inadequacies in the driving system”.
And hence, we blame collisions on people on factors that “could have been prevented by some change in the system”.
PS. Check out my YouTube and recent Critical Control / barrier vid: https://youtube.com/@safe_as_pod?si=iUaDPJynPemQRZhY
Shout a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/benhutchinson
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