Alan Searle Consultancy Limited
Alan Searle MBPsS
Behavioural Psychologist
www.alansearleconsultancy.co.uk
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?
The Forest Has Eyes
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.
What do you see?
Now what do you see?
Real Environment
Sorting of information
and grouping
Information about the
environment through
senses
Perceived
environment alters
behaviour
Organize
information
and compare with
previous
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
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
 One of the most widely used self-report inventories
 Based upon Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s (18751961) 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 5......
1
2
3
4
5
2
1
Reverse
scoring
5
4
3
Questions, scoring and results.....
1, 6R, 11, 16, 21R, 26, 31R, 36
2 2
2
4
4
4
3
3
2 4
2
4
2
4
3
3
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 Personality
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