The drive to work efficiency is paradoxically also the drive to make humans work unconsciously in automaticity. Any, effort to engage in slow conscious rational thinking slows down the job to nearly a halt.

Bargh (2007) (ede.) in Social Psychology and the Unconscious, The Automaticity of Higher Mental Processes. Psychology Press, New York, maps neatly how this all works. As fallible humans face their environment and all it affords, humans respond not by thinking consciously but by responding non-consciously through learned heuristics, routines, habits and repetitive experiences that become embodied as muscle and neuronal memory.

Once our skills, and knowledge have been stored in embodied memory, we can then set about acting intuitively to nearly every experience we have had previously. The more repetitive the experience, the less we need to ‘think’ about it. This process only comes undone when situations, affordances and context change and so our automaticity no longer matches what has changed. Most times it does and people are perfectly safe in a state of automaticity.

We all know what this is like, having driven a long trip and not being able to recall one part of the trip, as if we drove 90kms in a trance. Bargh discusses this in (Wyer, 1997, The Automaticity of Everyday Life, chapter One).

The research of many like Bargh, dispel the mythical belief that the brain directs decision making. Yet, this is the myth that safety believes as is demonstrated by so much brain-centric semiotics in safety. We even see groups like HOP put the brain, front and centre of its log as if the brain is a light globe.

In HOP, they even put the brain in a pot, as if the brain is central to decision making. It is not, but the myth is constantly maintained in traditional safety like this through the semiotic myth that the b rain directs thinking and decision making. It doesn’t.

Chase up the research (https://safetyrisk.net/essential-readings-neuroscience-and-the-whole-person/), this is not how humans make decisions. What is more, this belief in brain-centric thinking drives methods and outcomes that are disconnected from reality. Such is the attractiveness of myths and semiotics that seek to explain human complexity in the symbol of the brain. Beliefs matter in safety.

The reality is 95% of all human decision making is not driven by the brain. But in Safety, such beliefs have been made sacred and must not be questioned despite the evidence. This is how myths work and how they are made to take on cult-like conformity/loyalty. But it’s not real. The evidence says otherwise.

And still all the brain-centric training goes on, nothing gets better but the assumption of brain-centrism must not be questioned. The fault lies somewhere else, perhaps we need an even better training regime, greater diligence, longer training sessions?

Until safety is prepared to jettison this false belief in brain. Centrism and its associated nonsense of complacency, there will be no improvement in how safety tackles risk. You can shout S2, differently and new view from the rooftops but until the old paradigm changes, it’s still the same methodology driving the same methods.

Meanwhile, in the real world, where we prize efficiency above all else, we encourage the development of unconscious decision making as much as we can, so workers don’t think consciously in what they do. Such is the value of automaticity.