Alan Searle Consultancy Limited Alan Searle MBPsS Behavioural Psychologist

Human Factors

What’s the plan....  We are going to talk about us..... Yes the individual.....  The focus will be on  Perception  Personality  Behaviour  To help understand how we are key to health and safety at work through Human Factors

First task of the talk Get into groups around your table  You need 2 lists:  Write a list about what makes a good day from the moment you wake up in the morning to the first 10 minutes getting into work  Now write a list of what makes a bad day!

Explore the Individual

Perception and Personality 1.What is perception? 2.What causes people to have different perceptions of the same situation? 3.Can people be mistaken in their perceptions? 4.What is personality and how does it affect behaviour?

Perception  What Is Perception? – The process by which individuals organize and interpret their impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.  Why Is It Important? – Because people ’ s behaviour is based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality itself. – The world as it is perceived is the world that is behaviourally important. – The attribution process guides our behaviour, regardless of the truth of the situation.

Basic Principles of Sensation and Perception  Sensation is the process that detects stimulation from our bodies and our environment.  Perception is the process that organizes those stimuli into meaningful objects and events and interprets them. It includes cognition as a process of thinking involving learning and remembering, generalising, feeling and attitude formation, liking and disliking.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

What do you see?

Cognitive Psychology: Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience, 2nd Ed. by Bruce Goldstein. Copyright © 2008 by Wadsworth Publishing, a division of Thomson Learning. All rights reserved. The Forest Has Eyes

What do you see? Now what do you see?

Information about the environment through senses Sorting of information and grouping Organize information and compare with previous Real Environment Perceived environment alters behaviour

Perceptual Errors in Human Bias  Selective Perception – People selectively interpret what they see based on their interests, background, experience, and attitudes.  Halo Effect – Drawing a general impression about an individual based on a single characteristic (could be good or bad).  Stereotyping – Judging someone on the basis of your perception of the group to which that person belongs.  Prejudice – An unfounded dislike of a person or group based on their belonging to a particular stereotyped group.

Why Do Perceptions and Judgment Matter?  Self-Fulfilling Prophecy – A concept that proposes a person will behave in ways consistent with how he or she is perceived by others.

Personality The sum total of ways in which an individual reacts and interacts with others.  Personality Determinants – Hereditary – Environmental Factors – Situational Conditions  Personality Traits – Enduring characteristics that describe an individual ’ s behaviour. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) The Big Five Model

Who are you? Take a moment to think of 2 words that you would use to describe yourself to someone you have not met before...

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

 One of the most widely used self-report inventories  Based upon Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s ( ) notion of psychological types in individual behaviour  He believed that differences between people are not random, instead they form patterns – types  The MBTI was further developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katherine Cook Briggs in 1943 – present day Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Measures your preferences on four different scales

The MBTI Connection Your PREFERRED hand - sign you name 4 times  Feels natural, you didn’t think about it, it was effortless, looks neat and legible Your NONPREFERRED hand – sign your name 4 times  Feels unnatural, had to concentrate, was awkward, looks childlike

Why do we use it?  Knowing your preferences could enable you to understand yourself and better understand people around you!!!

What is the Big Five?  Personality Traits or Personality Dimensions  Individual differences in social and emotional life organized into a five-factor model of personality  “broad abstract level and each dimension summarized a larger number of … personality characteristics” (Oliver & Srivastava, 1999)

Where did the Big Five come from?  Most of the socially relevant and salient personality characteristics have become encoded in the natural language.  Allport & Odbert (1936): 18,000 terms, identified 4 categories  Cattell (1943) : broke 18,000 down to subset of 4,500 trait terms, then down to 35  Tupes & Christal (1961) through analysis found five factors  Today, many researchers believe that they are five core personality traits McCrae & Costa (1987) have really led the way in recent times

The Big Five Model  Classifications – Openness to Experience – Conscientiousness – Extraversion – Agreeableness – Neuroticism / Emotional Stability

Scoring The Big Reverse scoring Questions, scoring and results , 6R, 11, 16, 21R, 26, 31R, Your score Actual score

Big Five Personality Factors

Self-Monitoring  The ability for the individual to adjust behaviour to external situational factors accordingly.  Reflection and a theory by Schön (1983) describes two types of reflection. – In-action – On-action

Negative Workplace Emotions  Negative emotions can lead to negative workplace behaviours: – Production (leaving early, intentionally working slowly) – Property (stealing, sabotage) – Political (gossiping, blaming co-workers) – Personal aggression (verbal abuse)

Proactive Personali ty  A person who identifies opportunities, shows initiative, takes action, and perseveres until meaningful change occurs.  This is just a taste of how health and safety in the workplace can be addressed by using behavioural psychology to support the individual and the organisation.

Thank you