SH135: 17 Cognitive Biases which Contribute to Diving Accidents

Cognitive biases and mental shortcuts significantly impact decision-making, especially in high-risk environments like diving, where errors can have critical or fatal consequences. Factors such as narcosis, reduced visibility, and altered sound perception exacerbate these biases, distorting reality and affecting safety. Common biases include anchoring, overconfidence, and confirmation bias, each influencing risk perception and decision-making in unique ways. Awareness and mitigation of these biases are vital, achieved through strategies like education, training, crew resource management, and system changes to reduce reliance on human behavior alone. Understanding these factors is essential to improving safety and preventing incidents often attributed to "human error."

Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/17-cognitive-biases

Links: Types of cognitive bias: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/i-am-biased-you-are-biased-we-are-all-biased

Normalisation of deviance blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/being-a-deviant-is-normal

Dunning-Kruger effect blog: 

​​https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/incompetent-and-unaware-you-don-t-know-what-you-don-t-know

Tags: English, Gareth Lock

​​