Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
very successful. Good rules are like condensed knowledge: Everything
we know about a certain task or tool is integrated in an instruction on
how to do a certain task or job. If one understands the rule, one under-
stands a lot about the ins and outs of that aspect of work.
There are, however, serious indications that the amount of rules
and regulations sometimes has gone beyond a point where they still
are contributing to safety. Some claim that there are areas in which
rules already have a counterproductive effect. There are several pro-
blems involved.
The first problem with rules is that people can only digest a certain
amount of them. Organizations have ring binders full of rules and
regulations and expect that everybody knows them by heart.
Another problem is that the more rules that are created, the greater
the chance that different rules will start conflicting with each other,
especially when different sources are involved (for example, govern-
ment and company policy).
From a psychological perspective, a major problem is that rules cre-
ate a fake sense of safety. People rely on rules and expect that every-
body sticks to them regardless what happens. Rules can bring us
into a comfort zone mode that leads to not really paying attention
to what
s happening around us. In other words, rules wrongfully
create a sense of safety that kills our safety alertness. We lose the
necessary vigilance to monitor all our surrounding traffic.
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Research in the area of traffic safety has recently shown that each
situation has an optimum level of rules and regulations. One would
expect that the more behavior is regulated and people stick to the
traffic rules, the fewer accidents will happen on the street. Recent
experiments with the Shared Space concept, developed by
Monderman, show the opposite. Monderman states that the fewer
ruleswehaveandthemorewehavetorelyoneachother,themore
socially we behave. If a driver is not sure what other road users are
going to do, she has to watch them. Unpredictability raises the gen-
eral anxiety level and activates safety awareness. Road users stay
more vigilant if they are not fully sure how the other users are going
to behave. They must all keep scanning the direction and speed of
other road users and adjust their own behavior to it. This alertness
has a stronger effect on safety than the predictability created by regu-
lations of behavior. As stated before, we are very good in following
