Why are smart people so safety stupid?

Back in September of last year I posted a blog entitled: “Operational Latitude: Stepping Back From the Edge”.   The premise of the piece was a discussion on why workers can so frequently go right to the EDGE of working latitude.  In doing so they knowingly put themselves and others at risk of injury.  We discussed the fact that rules and regulations to force people back from the edge don’t seem to have lasting impact on the individuals.  Since rules don’t seem to work we looked to a culture change in the workplace, one that would make safe work practices the norm.  The call went out for change agents that could help accomplish this cultural transformation.  We discussed Dr. Morris Massey’s work regarding people who permanently changed the way they themselves approach a task due to experiencing a Significant Personal Event.  Some would call this experiencing a NEAR MISS that so effects you it rewires your brain to never do whatever brought you to the event ever again.   If these people became the change agents, could they help others permanently “step away from the edge” without actually having to experience the NEAR DISASTER?  (I think this term is much more descriptive than NEAR MISS)

During my career over the last 20 to 25 years I have preached this doctrine and helped many organizations find these cultural change agents.  If I look back over the results obtained I can honestly say that there was significant change for the better in about 25 percent of the organizations where workplace cultural change was attempted.  Furthermore, I would estimate that in another 45 to 50 percent of the organizations some lasting changes were incorporated into the workplace approach to safety.

Over the Memorial Day weekend  I read about the tragic death of John F. Nash, the Nobel Prize winner for his work in economic theory.  You might recall that Dr. Nash was the person portrayed in the movie “A Beautiful Mind”.  Dr. Nash and his wife were in a taxi traveling on the New Jersey Turnpike, a very high speed roadway, when the driver lost control of the car, hit a guardrail, and then another car.  Both Dr. Nash and his wife were ejected from the car and pronounced dead at the scene.  It was reported by the New York Times that the New Jersey State Police said it was likely that neither Dr. Nash nor his wife were wearing seat belts.  Now here was a very very intelligent man, a Nobel Prize winner.  In fact, Dr. Nash was returning home from Norway where he had received the Abel Prize from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.  So I asked myself, as a person who has endlessly preached safe practices during his working career and in family life, why did such a smart person do something so obviously unsafe?

If you look at the “driving culture” I would suggest that it is a well established rule that when you get in a car the first thing you do is click on the seat belt.  But then I began to think of situations I the safety expert have been in and much to my dismay I can pick out a number of times that I have jumped into a cab in major cities around the world and knowingly did not buckle up because I was only going a few blocks.   What was worse is that I have personally had my Significant Personal Event that changed the way I thought about seat belts.  Why this blind spot in my personal behavior?  Why have I chosen to live on the edge in these instances?

If you think about it there are quite a few examples of smart people doing this very unsafe thing.  You might remember the 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon.  Now here was a man who seemed to have done everything and been everywhere to get the story.  Mr. Simon has a stack of major awards such as Emmys and Peabodys.  Over 47 years in the business Mr. Simon was in practically every major war zone since the Vietnam War.  He reported on any number of human interest items as well.  These stories took him to the furthest reaches of the world.  As said by 60 Minutes Executive Producer Jeff Fager in describing his death, “It is such a tragedy made worse because we lost him in a car accident, a man who has escaped more difficult situations than almost any journalist in modern times”.  Yes, that is right, a car accident.  As reported by CBS News Simon was riding in the backseat of a livery cab on New York City’s West Side Highway when the car rear-ended another vehicle and crashed into barriers separating north and southbound traffic.  Police confirmed that Simon was not wearing a seatbelt.  Yet another smart person doing a very unsafe act.

Then I remembered that I had written a blog post about the Tracy Morgan accident.  Mr. Morgan was a passenger on a limo bus that was rear-

ended on the New Jersey Turnpike.  The National Transportation Safety Board in a preliminary report showed that a Walmart Truck being driven by a driver, who had been awake for the last 24 hours, was driving 20 mph over the speed limit when he hit the limo that was stopped in traffic.  Mr. Morgan’s representatives sued Walmart for negligence.  In a surprising turn of events Walmart has responded by suggesting that part of the blame is due to Mr. Morgan’s failure to properly wear an appropriate available seat belt.  Tracy Morgan was severely injured and is today trying to recover from a traumatic brain injury.  Mr. Morgan’s attorney Benedict Morelli said, “He’s still fighting and trying to live his life at the same time and trying to get better, and he’s just not better.  We’re hoping and praying to get him back to where he was”.  Another smart person doing an inherently unsafe thing.  Yes I know it was the truck driver’s fault but would Tracy Morgan be “back to where he was” if he had taken five seconds to fasten the seat belt?  It is an unanswerable question but I have to believe things would have been much better if he had.

So we have had a Nobel Prize Winner, an exceptional global reporter, and a well known comedian, all of whom well accomplished and all who

knowingly did a very unsafe act and paid a price for it.  There are many more examples I could list here.  The former Governor of New Jersey, Jon Corzine was injured after a traffic accident on the Garden State Parkway (the other high speed road in New Jersey).  The New York Times reported that he broke his left leg, sternum, collarbone, six ribs on each side and a lower vertebra.  State Police indicated that neither weather nor speed appeared to be a factor but rather another car that suddenly swerved into the path of the Governor’s caravan.   The State Police Superintendent stated that “he was unsure whether Mr. Corzine was wearing a seatbelt but he often does not”. Now in contrast to the Governor’s injuries were those of Samantha Gordon, an assistant, who was traveling in the car with him.  She was also hurt in the accident but walked into the hospital unassisted.  What are all these people who are so smart thinking when it comes time to buckle up?

I am starting to believe that we need more than rules and culture change.  The fact that seatbelts save lives is an undisputed fact in our driving culture today.  But for some reason people, including myself the “safety expert”, have violated the click-it rule on occasion.  As is so well known, when you dwell on the latitude edge your chances of significant negative effects are greatly magnified.  Yet smart people of all persuasions still do it even after being aware of the above well documented examples.  Want another one?  We could go back and discuss the tragic loss of Lady Diana who also chose not to buckle up as well.

Why? There has been some work done in this area.  Kurt Kleiner of the University of Toronto has written an article entitled: “Why Smart People Do Stupid Things”.  In the article he introduces the work of Professor Keith Stanovich who posits that the reason smart people can sometimes be stupid is that intelligence and rationality are different.  Professor Stanovich has coined a term to describe the failure to act rationally despite adequate intelligence: “dysrationalia”.

Stanovich identifies a source of dysrationalia that I think is quite pertinent to our discussion today.  He calls this source a
“mindware gap”.  Mindware, he says is made up of learned cognitive rules , strategies and belief systems.  It includes our understanding of probabilities and statistics, as well as our willingness to consider alternative hypotheses when trying to solve a problem.  However, some highly intelligent people never acquire the appropriate mindware. People can suffer from “contaminated mindware” such as superstition, which leads to irrational decisions.  I would add to that the idea that many of us carry with us mindware that states: “it will never happen to me”. So we get into the backseat of a taxi and decide it is not worth the effort to belt up.

After all these years I have come to the conclusion that in order to make people behave safely requires a multi-faceted approach that deals with setting appropriate rules, reinforcing safe expectations from the peer group and additionally working with one’s own dysrationalia to reduce the amount of contaminated mindware we all carry with us.  I think the job has just become much more difficult than I imagined.