Safe As week in review: E17 on critical decisions and local rationality and E18 on affect and risk as feelings

Safe As podcast covered two topics this week:

1) Unpacking local rationality and decisions prior to incidents

2) Risk as feelings, not just numbers

Ep 17: Discussed two different techniques – first the Critical Decision Method (image 1), the classic technique used widely for probing cues that contributed to decisions.

Image 2 are two extracts from Louise Roe’s Local Rationality Tool, which covers quite a lot of ground for unpacking decisions and what information was available to people before an incident.

E18: Explored affect – being the experience of feeling, emotion, attachment or mood. They discuss how people experience ‘risk’ – noting several definitions and elements.

Their core argument is that risk, as people experience it, is not an analytical process weighing up probabilities, but heavily informed by emotion.

They argue that our “emotional reactions to risky situations often diverge from cognitive assessments of those risks”.

Moreover, what we feel about risk precedes and informs what we feel about risk.

Pods:
17: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/Dni8R1AXsVb
18: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/vr9SvZUMuVb

Sources:

Image 1: Klein, G. A., Calderwood, R., & Macgregor, D. (1989). Critical decision method for eliciting knowledge. IEEE Transactions on systems, man, and cybernetics, 19(3), 462-472.

Image 2: Roe, L. (2025). Local rationality question tool: understanding why it made sense at the time. In Golightly, Dave, Balfe, Nora, & Charles, Rebecca (Eds.) Contemporary Ergonomics and Human Factors 2025: Proceedings of the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors Annual Conference. Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors, United Kingdom, pp. 360-362.

Image 3: Loewenstein, G. F., Weber, E. U., Hsee, C. K., & Welch, N. (2001). Risk as feelings. Psychological bulletin, 127(2), 267.