Session: Lies We Tell Ourselves – Cognitive Bias and Human Factors in Process Safety

Humans are not great at assessing risk. In particular, engineers tend to be an optimistic group, ready to solve any problem by relying on their technical skills and experience. They are particularly bad when it comes to assessing high consequence, low frequency events like those typically discussed during a Process Hazard Analysis (PHA). They may fail to fully grasp the meaning of measurement in unfamiliar units, like risk criteria expressed in terms of once in a million years. Papers in this session will discuss several lies we tell ourselves when confronted with the need to identify worst case scenario such as “It can’t happen here”, “It can’t possibly be that bad”, “We will know there is a problem and we will fix it”, and “We can engineer our way out of this”. This session also invites papers to explore how diversity and inclusion in human factors engineering can benefit safety (e.g., inclusive design approach can prevent unintended biases from compromising safety).