Safety Psychology
Safety Psychology
Safety psychology is a part of industrial
psychology and can be defined as follows: Safety psychology is a study of human
factors and behaviour contributing to the
causation of hazard, accident or unsafe
environment or situation and the application of
remedial measures to prevent and control them
by improving human behaviour for safe job
performance and relations with others to
maintain the safety.
Thus safety psychology studies a person
why he commits accidents, under what
circumstances and what are other contributing
factors affecting his behaviour or making him
accident prone and how such behaviour can be
corrected to rectify his unsafe actions to achieve
the goal of overall safety which includes the
techniques of accident prevention.
The human being is at the centre of such study
and therefore it is called the human engineering. The
concept of safety as human engineering is its
psychological part. It aims at the rectification of
human errors, human factors and unsafe actions
as the causes of accidents or unsafe
environment. H.W. Heinrich says in his old
book on Industrial Accident Prevention that
psychology lies at the root of sequence of
accident causes. For details see next chapter. 4.2 Present Psychological Safety
Problems:
Field of safety psychology is applicable to
employer and employee both. Accidents are the
results of faults of employer or employee. The
main responsibility to provide and maintain safe working conditions, safe environment and
protective equipment lies upon the employer,
however, the practical field of effort for
prevention through psychology and use of
protective equipment, is applied largely to the
employees. The employees being more in
number render more chances of human faults.
Therefore it is their great, individual and group
or collective responsibility to minimise their
human faults to prevent accidents and to
maintain safety. Present psychological safety problems can
be divided in two parts: Employer’s problems
and Employee’s problems. Ultimately they
create problems for society and nation also.
