Book Description

"This report is a compilation of the papers presented during the symposium, "The Reliability of Human Performance In Work" at the 1966 Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Altman's paper is concerned with the classification and combination of human error data in psychologically meaningful ways. He examines alternative ways of classifying human error to facilitate integration of error data for reliability estimates that will be useful to the psychologist. Dr. Swain discusses some practical limitations in using the simple multiplicative model with a molecular definition of behavioral elements to estimate task reliability in man-machine systems. He describes advantages of estimating conditional probabilities of larger (molar) units of behavior when employing the probability tree technique in reliability analysis. Dr. Meister's paper addresses the importance of production worker error to system reliability, together with characteristics that differentiate production error from operating error. Factors that predispose to worker error are analyzed in the context of the production process as a man-machine system."--Abstract.