Transcript – Virtual Reality, Process Safety, and Counterfactual Thinking

This project is looking at the impact of counterfactual training on the use of procedures, and it applied this in a virtual reality process, safety paradigm. Our original goal was to have participants come into the lab and do one task in a second life environment and have that task be such that it was likely that they would have an incident or an explosion. As you can see in Figure B, that’s what an explosion would look like. And then afterwards, the participants would be assigned to one of three conditions, a condition that had good counterfactuals. And a counterfactual is when you consider alternatives to past events. And good counterfactual training is when you think about how things might have been better. And so our good counterfactual condition was when you the participants would think about how things could have been better. A bad counterfactual condition would be if they had thought about how things could have been worse. The control conditions would be if they just thought about attributes of the task. Our hypothesis was that then when the participants did a second task out after the counterfactual condition that those who were in the positive are good counterfactual condition would be more likely to not have an explosion. With the second task, however, we’ve had two major challenges with this study. One, the virtual reality is actually kind of difficult to make difficult. So we’ve really had a hard time making the two tasks equally likely to have an explosion. The second thing is with Covid. So now we cannot have participants come into our lab. So we have resolved the task equivalency issue.

And now what we’re doing is we’re taking the entire task online. So we’re stepping into the brave new world of doing fully online experimental tasks.There’s certainly some challenges with this and those are listed on the poster and we have started data collection.

Please keep your fingers and toes crossed for us. And our write up in publication should be available this spring.