Why Do People Make Mistakes?

Multitasking is endemic in modern life and work: drivers talk on cell phones, office workers type while answering phone calls, students do homework while text messaging, nurses prepare injections while responding to doctors calls, and air traffic controllers direct aircraft in one sector while handling additional traffic in another. Whether in daily life or at work, we are constantly bombarded with multiple, concurrent interruptions and demands and we have all somehow come to believe in the myth that we can, and in fact are expected to, easily address them all - without any repercussions. However, accumulating scientific evidence is now suggesting that multitasking increases the probability of human error. This talk presents a set of NASA studies that characterize concurrent demands in one work domain, routine airline cockpit operations, in order to illustrate the ways operational task demands together with the proclivity to manage them all concurrently make human performance in this and in any domain vulnerable to potentially serious errors and to accidents.