(57f) Using Counterfactual Training to Improve Process Safety: An Innovative Pilot Study

Purpose: Counterfactual thinking focuses on how the past might have been different. These thoughts are usually prompted by negative events that block one’s goals. Workers in high-risk jobs often report that they are more likely to attend to potential risks in their work if they have experienced a work-related negative event. This may be due to their engaging in counterfactual thought and applying that to future situations. This pilot study is investigating whether the benefits of counterfactual thinking can be overtly included into training paradigms for workers in high risk industries. If the training is found to be effective, it would suggest that this type of training could be used to reduce the probability of future incidents in the high-risk domain and can play an important role to save many lives and injuries in workplace.

Methodology: The study will take place in one session lasting 60 minutes. Participants will complete two warehouse tasks in a virtual reality environment (SecondLife®). In the first task, they will experience a simulated incident (i.e., explosion) if they do not perform all the steps exactly. Then the participants will complete a writing task that consists of either counterfactual training or a control task (not associated with counterfactual thinking). After completing the writing task, participants will complete the second task and may experience an incident if they do not perform all the steps correctly. Participants’ performance between the first and second task will be compared for the counterfactual and control conditions.

Results: Previous research on counterfactual thinking and training has shown it to be a successful strategy for learning from mistakes, increasing motivation to improve future behavior, and promoting positive behavior change. We hypothesize that the counterfactual group will perform better on the task and follow the procedure more carefully during their second task than the group who experiences the control condition.

Conclusion: Counterfactual thinking allows us to mentally manipulate our past behavior and imagine a better (or worse) alternative outcome. This research will investigate if this kind of thinking can be applied to industrial settings using written procedures and can support creating a safer workplace. Currently there is limited research investigating the application of counterfactual training to this domain and the current research will address this gap. If successful, this training methodology may be able to minimize the risk of future incidents (and maximize performance/safety) thus it is an important line of research because it may save lives, reduce, injuries, and reduce incidents overall.