Nees Michael A, Sharma Nithya, Shore Ava
Lafayette College, Department of Psychology, Oechsle Hall, 350 Hamilton Street, Easton, PA 18042, United States.
Lafayette College, Department of Psychology, Oechsle Hall, 350 Hamilton Street, Easton, PA 18042, United States.
Accid Anal Prev. 2020 Dec;148:105792. doi: 10.1016/j.aap.2020.105792. Epub 2020 Oct 2.
Attributions of the causes of accidents to human error are problematically reductive, yet such attributions persist in media coverage. Few experiments have examined how human error attributions affect people's perceptions. An experiment compared attributions of accidents to "human error" versus other causes ("mechanical failure," "technical error," or "computer error"). Participants (N = 971) from an online sample read one of 50 real news excerpts describing accidents from a broad array of domains (e.g., aviation, automobiles, manufacturing, and infrastructure, among others). Stories kept the same or similar details, with only the causal attribution altered to compare human error to other causes. With human error attributions, participants were in greater agreement with the statement that an individual deserved to be punished for the accident and in less agreement that an organization or company was responsible for the accident. People also perceived past human error accidents to have been more preventable, although ratings of prospective preventability were not significantly different for human error versus other attributions. The idiosyncratic details of particular accidents contributed more variance to perceptions than the causal attribution. The same pattern of results was replicated in a second experiment (N = 1195), and new analyses found no evidence that the relationship between causal attributions and perceptions was moderated by the personal relevance of the news story. Our findings suggested that, when an accident is attributed to human error in media, the public may be less likely to expect examination or mitigation of systemic shortcomings (e.g., in design, organizational practices, etc.) that precipitate accidents.
将事故原因归咎于人为失误具有问题性的简化倾向，但这种归咎在媒体报道中依然存在。很少有实验研究过人为失误归咎如何影响人们的认知。一项实验比较了将事故归咎于“人为失误”与其他原因（“机械故障”、“技术错误”或“计算机错误”）的情况。来自在线样本的971名参与者阅读了50篇真实新闻摘录中的一篇，这些摘录描述了广泛领域（如航空、汽车、制造业和基础设施等）的事故。故事保持相同或相似的细节，只是将因果归咎进行改变，以比较人为失误与其他原因。当归咎于人为失误时，参与者更认同个人应为事故受罚的说法，而不太认同组织或公司应对事故负责。人们还认为过去因人为失误导致的事故更具可预防性，不过对于人为失误与其他归咎方式，未来可预防性的评分并无显著差异。特定事故的独特细节比因果归咎对认知的影响更大。在第二项实验（N = 1195）中重复了相同的结果模式，新的分析发现没有证据表明因果归咎与认知之间的关系会因新闻故事的个人相关性而有所不同。我们的研究结果表明，当媒体将事故归咎于人为失误时，公众可能不太期望对导致事故的系统性缺陷（如设计、组织实践等方面）进行审查或改进。
