On taking human performance seriously in risk analysis: Comments on dougherty

Abstract As Dougherty points out, the task of understanding the human contribution to safety and risk has been delayed too long. To begin to take human performance questions seriously in risk analysis requires sophisticated causal modeling of human behaviour in the context of different tasks and performance aids, empirical research to understand the sources of errors, especially cognitive error types, and empirical research to understand how changes in the person-machine system impact on error types.