Fabrizio Bracco

University of Genoa, IT
[human factor and the psychology of safety]
Eph is important because its methods can be useful in the investigation of human performance in social-technical systems. Accidents investigations often highlight the heavy contribution of human performance in terms of human errors, but then the investigation is often focused on objective data, stored in monitoring devices. Investigations underestimate the personal phenomenological perspective of the people involved (operators are asked to describe their behaviours but not the reasons behind them) and this leads to a poor picture of the situation. Eph can also help to cope with the hindsight bias, i.e. evaluators tend to reconstruct the event by highlighting only the factors and cues that lead to it. Again, there is a sort of phenomenological neglect involved here: Eph can help reconstructing the story that really took place in the head of the operators before the accident.