Brendan Wallace

A ground-breaking new book, Beyond Human Error: Taxonomies and Safety Science deconstructs the conventional concept of human error and provides a whole new way of looking at accidents and how they might be prevented. The majority of accidents and incidents are caused, at some level, by human error. This text provides an introduction to this key field as well as a broad background to the subject. Incorporating the sociology of disaster and accidents into a practical framework, it offers a new paradigm for the subject. The authors address the roots ofhuman error in the Western tradition and discuss the history of human error studies, human factors, and ergonomics, exploring hidden assumptions that have colored past research. They include current methodologies of experimental design, new paradigms, and outlines situated and distributed cognition models, and more useful intervention strategies.

Professionals striving for accident reduction must deal with systems in which both technical and human elements play equal and complementary roles. However, many of the existing techniques in ergonomics and risk management concentrate on plant and technical issues and downplay human factors and "subjectivity." Safety Management: A Qualitative Systems Approach describes a body of theories and data that addresses safety by drawing on systems theory and applied psychology, stressing the importance of human activity within systems. It explains in detail the central roles of social consensus and reliability and the nature of verbal reports and functional discourse. This text presents a new approach to safety management, offering a path to both greater safety and to economic savings. It presents a series of methodological tools that have proven to be reliable through extensive use in the rail and nuclear industries. These methods allow organizational and systems failures to be analyzed much more effectively in terms of quantity, precision, and usefulness. The concepts and tools described in this book are particularly valuable for reliability engineers, risk managers, human factors specialists, and safety managers and professionals in safety-critical organizations.

Brendan Wallace, with a background in psychology, demonstrates that the key claims of Evolutionary Psychology (EP), popularised by Steven Pinker and others, are based on the 'brain is a digital computer' argument. He then argues that as we now know this model of the brain will not work, therefore EP won't work either, since it is based on a fallacious view of the mind/brain. The book, which is written in a reader friendly but rigorous style, is a timely assault on one of the most fashionable philosophies of mind currently 'out there'.

A ground-breaking new book, Beyond Human Error: Taxonomies and Safety Science deconstructs the conventional concept of human error and provides a whole new way of looking at accidents and how they might be prevented. The majority of accidents and incidents are caused, at some level, by human error. This text provides an introduction to this key field as well as a broad background to the subject. Incorporating the sociology of disaster and accidents into a practical framework, it offers a new paradigm for the subject. The authors address the roots ofhuman error in the Western tradition and discuss the history of human error studies, human factors, and ergonomics, exploring hidden assumptions that have colored past research. They include current methodologies of experimental design, new paradigms, and outlines situated and distributed cognition models, and more useful intervention strategies.

Professionals striving for accident reduction must deal with systems in which both technical and human elements play equal and complementary roles. However, many of the existing techniques in ergonomics and risk management concentrate on plant and technical issues and downplay human factors and "subjectivity." Safety Management: A Qualitative Systems Approach describes a body of theories and data that addresses safety by drawing on systems theory and applied psychology, stressing the importance of human activity within systems. It explains in detail the central roles of social consensus and reliability and the nature of verbal reports and functional discourse. This text presents a new approach to safety management, offering a path to both greater safety and to economic savings. It presents a series of methodological tools that have proven to be reliable through extensive use in the rail and nuclear industries. These methods allow organizational and systems failures to be analyzed much more effectively in terms of quantity, precision, and usefulness. The concepts and tools described in this book are particularly valuable for reliability engineers, risk managers, human factors specialists, and safety managers and professionals in safety-critical organizations.