Trip-Hit Accidents and Safety: Human Error Psychology and Influence of the Subconscious Mind in Preventing and Causing Trip Hit Accidents

Abstract

Much of the trip-hit accidents in industry or home are of false or mis-cognitive causes. The victim was in a situation where the person failed to judge the position of the obstacle and his psychomotor system misunderstood the environment and thus caused the trip or hit. When a person does the same job repeatedly, the person’s subconscious mind learns how to do it. Hypothesis was that during a repetitive activity when our sub conscious mind is taking control of it, we tend to make an error or accident in the activity if the activity environment changes because our sub conscious may fail to recognize the change in the work environment”. A wire-loop activity game was designed for the purpose of experiment. The experiment is essentially a hand-eye coordination task wherein the subject has to traverse a loop along a central wire without touching it.. Several parameters were varied during the experimental run without the subject noticing it which tested the psychological, cognitive and other response factors of the subjects.The experimental results proved the hypothesis. It was observed that when the subject was carrying out the task with his subconscious mind and when the work environment (task) was altered, the subject made more number of errors. Also on comparison of gender, females tend to show greater working capacity with their subconscious mind than males.