Why ‘They should have’, ‘...could have’ or ‘I would have..’ do not improve diving safety
When things go wrong, or incidents/accidents happen, it is easy to identify how the problem could have been prevented by applying one of the following the phrases ‘If only they’d done A…’ or ‘They should have done B…’ or ‘They could have done C…’ or ‘I would have done D…’ We do this because we are trying to identify a way in which we could prevent the same thing happening again in the future.
This is a natural reaction. We are trying to bring order to disorder and is known as counterfactual reasoning. At its most basic form, we think that if the people had taken different actions, then the outcome would have been different. Unfortunately, we are applying non-existent facts to the story to tell a different one, one with a happy ending.
Here are a couple of examples of counterfactuals in relation to diving:
- If the rebreather diver had done his checklist properly, then he wouldn’t have entered the...