Safety culture is an important topic for managers in high-hazard industries because a deficient safety culture has been linked to organizational accidents. Many researchers have argued that trust plays a central role in models of safety culture but trust has rarely been measured in safety culture/climate studies. This article used explicit (direct) and implicit (indirect) measures to assess trust at a UK gas plant. Explicit measures assessed trust by asking workers to consider and state their attitude to attitude objects. Implicit measures assessed trust in a more subtle way by using a priming task that relies on automatic attitude activation. The results show that workers expressed explicit trust for their workmates, supervisors, and senior managers, but only expressed implicit trust for their workmates. The article proposes a model that conceptualizes explicit trust as part of the surface levels of safety culture and implicit trust as part of the deeper levels of safety culture. An unintended finding was the positive relationship between implicit measures of trust and distrust, which suggests that trust and distrust are separate constructs. The article concludes by considering the implications for safety culture and trust and distrust in high-hazard industries.

This study explored the effects of open communication about occupational risks on workers' trust beliefs and trust intentions toward risk management, and the resilience of these beliefs and intentions to further risk information. An experimental survey of 393 student nurses showed the importance of open communication in the development of worker trust in risk management. Consistent with the trust asymmetry principle, we found that the increase in trust beliefs following open communication was weaker than the reduction in trust following a lack of communication. Further, the level of trust developed through communication (or lack of) influenced the way that subsequent risk information was processed. Negative risk information reduced trust beliefs in nurses with already low levels of trust while positive risk information increased trust beliefs only in those with already high levels. A similar pattern of results emerged for nurses' trust intentions, although the magnitude of these effects was weaker. The implications of these findings for occupational risk management are discussed.

This paper draws on the psychology of risk and "management guru" literature (Huczynski, 2006) to examine how cybersecurity risks are constructed and communicated by cybersecurity specialists. We conduct a rhetorical analysis of ten recent cybersecurity publications ranging from popular media to academic and technical articles. We find most cybersecurity specialists in the popular domain use management guru techniques and manipulate common cognitive limitations in order to over-dramatize and oversimplify cybersecurity risks to critical infrastructure (CI). We argue there is a role for government: to collect, validate and disseminate more data among owners and operators of CI; to adopt institutional arrangements with an eye to moderating exaggerated claims; to reframe the debate as one of trade-offs between threats and opportunities as opposed to one of survival; and, finally, to encourage education programs in order to stimulate a more informed debate over the longer term.

The purpose of this study was to assess attitudes toward and use of an electronic adverse incident reporting system in all four hospitals in one NHS Scotland Health Board area. A questionnaire was used to assess Medical Consultants', Managers', and Nurses' attitudes and perceptions about electronic adverse incident reporting. Actual adverse incident reporting data were also analysed. The main findings from this study are that Consultants, Managers, and Nurses all had positive attitudes about responsibility for reporting adverse incidents. All respondents indicated that the design of and information collected by the electronic adverse incident reporting system (DATIX) was adequate but Consultants had more negative attitudes and perceptions than Managers and Nurses about DATIX. All respondents expressed negative attitudes about the amount and type of feedback they receive from reporting, and Consultants expressed more negative attitudes about how DATIX is managed than Managers and Nurses. Analysis of adverse incident reporting data found that the proportion of Consultants using DATIX to report incidents was significantly lower than that of Managers and Nurses. The findings suggest that there are no additional barriers to incident reporting associated with the use of a bespoke electronic adverse incident reporting system as compared to other types of systems. Although an electronic adverse incident reporting system may be able to increase incident reporting and facilitate organisational learning by making it easier to report incidents and analyse incident reporting data, strong leadership within hospitals / healthcare professions (or healthcare subcultures) is still required in order to promote and sustain incident reporting to improve patient safety

Communication of health risk events is a complex and challenging task. The advent of information and communication technology along with the following popularisation and widespread uptake of social media are reshaping the field of risk communication. Guided by key tenets of the Social Amplification of Risk Framework, this study developed a causal loop diagram, capturing the perceptions of professionals in health organisations regarding the role of Twitter during risk events. The aim of this paper is to explore the use of the causal loop diagram and its role with rationalising the use of Twitter in risk communication strategies. A key finding of the model is the central role of trust and its interrelationship with other factors during a risk event. A contribution is made to operational research through the novel use of soft system dynamics in risk communication, to risk communication through the investigation of the new medium Twitter and also to research on the Social Amplification of Risk Framework by providing a means through which to operationalise the framework.