The psychology of accident investigation: epistemological, preventive, moral and existential meaning-making

This paper extends research on accident investigation as exercises in political sensemaking, by considering the possible psychological meaning-making purposes of accident investigation. Accident investigations and reports serve epistemological or preventive aims: finding out what went wrong and avoiding recurrence. These are not necessarily the same: the variables that explain a particular event might diverge from those that help forestall a larger family of events. In addition, accident investigation serves moral and existential purposes. Accident investigations are (often implicitly) expected to render people’s suffering accountable to reason and open to solution, prevention and elimination. The Western world tends to locate both the meaning and cause of suffering in the realm of human moral choice, which typically condenses accounts of failure down to single acts and actors. This competes with increasingly complex epistemological narratives of accidents that have neither obvious causes nor clear, linear cause!effect relationships.