Lies We Tell Ourselves – Cognitive Bias and Human Performance in Process Safety

Humans are not great at assessing risk. Technical professionals in particular tend to be an optimistic lot, ready to solve any problem by relying on their technical skills and experience. They particularly struggle 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”.