Around this time, corporate interests also seized on new theories in applied psychology that suggested certain people were accident-prone. According to the theories, this was a trait that some people had—not learned but inherent. The psychologists, often hired by corporations, proposed that workplace accidents only happened because some workers were accident-prone. Attempts to define and measure accident-proneness in workers appeared in some of the most important annals of academia. One study correlated a low accident rate among pilots with strong religious values. Another proposed that professional drivers who had more accidents than others were “mentally subnormal.” Among coal miners who had more accidents, the psychologists found guilt complexes, problems with authority, a psychosexual need to court danger. A staff psychologist at the Process Engineering Corporation attempted to prove that workers who had more accidents also lacked “socially desirable personality dispositions.” Another psychologist spent a few months driving and socializing with a group of taxi drivers. Among the taxi drivers with the highest rates of accidents on the job, he also noted a wealth of undesirable traits. Notably no one ever definitively proved that accident-proneness exists. Zero statistically valid cases were published. Not one experiment produced an affirmative result for an accident-proneness test.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/110/188/032/255/690/463/original/7e9f05fa8886131d.png