For Safety, Fight Conformity

Dave Smith has been an Industrial Maintenance Electrician since 1975. He has taught maintenance, troubleshooting and safety courses to thousands of electricians in mines, mills, refineries, factories, plants, power stations and offshore platforms throughout North America and the Middle East. Dave is a hands-on guy and teache...

Many workplace accidents could have been prevented had someone opposed the work practices that led to them. When I taught an arc flash course in Red Deer last spring, I met a man in his mid-20s who held up his hand to show the stubbed remains of his middle, ring and little fingers—the result of working with a new crew. Despite thinking their methods were not particularly safe, he went along with them because he “didn’t want the rest of the guys picking on me”.

This young man was the size of a football player, and easily had the strength to hang a licking on anyone foolish enough to “pick on” him. Instead, he chose to conform to the ways of the group and end up with a mangled hand. As the root cause of so many accidents, conformance demands a closer look.

Why do we conform?
Solomon Asch conducted research on the conformity response of individuals to GROUP THINKING, proving that 37% of the population will completely ignore what they see with their own eyes and go along with a group’s visibly incorrect judgments, with 65% of the population doing it at least once. See ASCH’s CONFORMITY EXPERIMENT at YouTube.

Recently, researchers at Emory University used an MRI to determine BRAIN FUNCTION RESPONSE to decision-making under varying conditions. When a subject was asked to make a judgment under normal conditions, his brain scan would show intense activity in the frontal cerebral cortex, and he would provide the correct answer.

When the same subject was asked to make a judgment on a similar task, but was now faced with a group of people providing an incorrect answer, his brain function shifted from the ‘thinking’ regions of the brain toward the ‘emotional’ regions. These experiments prove that social pressure can alter our perceptions to the degree where we believe the group must be right.

From the moment we are born, we are subjected to social conditioning from parents, siblings, grandparents, elders, friends, school, society, etc. We are trained to sit still, be quiet, colour within the lines, don’t tattle-tale, and so forth. This conditioning stays with us as adults.

Fighting conformity—for safety’s sake
So how do you combat our innate human willingness to conform to the group rather than be singled out as a “troublemaker”? First, recognize that your coworker—or even 20 coworkers—may be wrong and that you, in fact, may be the only one who’s right. When you hear someone say, “We’ve been doing it this way for years”, recognize that they may have been doing it wrong for years. Second, be aware of your reaction to a new crew, partner or supervisor—you may be going with a flow that is, ultimately, destructive.

Third, listen to your gut and heed its warnings: scientists feel they have, in fact, proved we have an early warning device called GUT FEEL. Fourth, adopt field-level risk assessments and follow procedures religiously. We work with machines that are oblivious to the pain they cause as they destroy your body, so plan your work, work your plan and make decisions devoid of emotion.

Finally, if you’re a supervisor and manager, don’t dismiss your group’s “renegades”, as they may simply be members of that minority with the emotional independence to tell you the truth.

Until next time, be ready, be careful and be safe.