A day in the life of a volunteer incident commander: errors, pressures and mitigating strategies.

To meet an identified gap in the literature this paper investigates the tasks that a volunteer incident commander needs to carry out during an incident, the errors that can be made and the way that errors are managed. In addition, pressure from goal seduction and situation aversion were also examined. Volunteer incident commanders participated in a two-part interview consisting of a critical decision method interview and discussions about a hierarchical task analysis constructed by the authors.

Explaining away the negative effects of evaluation on analogical transfer: the perils of premature evaluation.

Four experiments explored effects on analogical transfer of evaluating solutions to base problems. In contrast to reports of positive effects of explanation, evaluation consistently reduced transfer rates and impaired mental representations of base material. This effect was not ameliorated by encoding for a later memory test, summarizing, or engaging in similar processes at encoding and recall.

The breakdown of coordinated decision making in distributed systems.

Objective: This article aims to explore the nature and resolution of breakdowns in coordinated decision making in distributed safety-critical systems.

Background: In safety-critical domains, people with different roles and responsibilities often must work together to make coordinated decisions while geographically distributed. Although there is likely to be a large degree of overlap in the shared mental models of these people on the basis of procedures and experience, subtle differences may exist.

Socializing the human factors analysis and classification system: incorporating social psychological phenomena into a human factors error classification system.

Objective: The presence of social psychological pressures on pilot decision making was assessed using qualitative analyses of critical incident interviews.

Background: Social psychological phenomena have long been known to influence attitudes and behavior but have not been highlighted in accident investigation models.

Method: Using a critical incident method, 28 pilots who flew in Alaska were interviewed.