human error. Therefore they belong to the great number of 75-80% of all sea accidents in which the human operator failed to fulfil his tasks properly.

To enhance human reliability and to reduce the number of accidents is the purpose of all training and education in our profession. What role can experimental psychology play in order to achieve this goal?

2. Human Error

As already mentioned the human error or the human factor is made responsible for the majority (ca. 75 - 80%) of all shipping casualties. But this is also true for other modes of transportation. For instance in ca. 60% of all air and in ca. 90% of all road accidents it is also the human factor who is blamed to be the cause.

It becomes obvious that the proportion of human factor involvement is primarily dependent on the chosen method of statistical analysis. Anyway, it really does not matter whether we are talking about 60%, 80% or 90% since any number less than 100% is just a game with phrases and a result of a more or less random choice of a category - because at the end of the day every single accident has to be due to a human-factor-cause. This is certainly true as long as shipping or in a broader sense transportation will not be arranged to take place without any human involvement - that is from robots for robots.

Tracing back a chain of events, which led to an accident, one will always find within the chain a human being or better the behaviour of one or more humans that has contributed to the accident. Therefore, it can be stated that it will not make any sense at all to refer to the human factor as a cause for accidents unless it will be analysed and accurately determined what investigators mean by human error in a specific case.

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