Out of sight, out of mind

In 2003, NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry and all seven crew members died. The inquiry later found that managers had underestimated engineering concerns about launch damage to the shuttle’s left wing — a lapse that ultimately proved fatal.

When British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in 2010, killing 11 workers and triggering the largest marine oil spill in American history, investigators subsequently concluded that many of the key safety decisions had been made by people hundreds of miles from the facility.

And when the 2018 Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California, and killed 85 people, an investigation found that Pacific Gas and Electric executives had gradually put other priorities ahead of maintaining the infrastructure that failed.

Each of these disasters involved organizations with explicit safety cultures and highly trained engineers. So, what went wrong?

It’s a question that’s long interested David Hofmann, Hugh L. McColl  Jr. Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior and senior associate dean of UNC Executive Development at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.

In a series of studies, he and his colleagues explore how distance — both real and psychological — shapes how people perceive risk and whether they treat safety as an obligation or an afterthought.

“When you’re overseeing a work environment thousands of miles away, you tend to focus on the big picture — the goals and the strategy of the operation — and you lose sight of the concrete, day-to-day realities of what’s happening on the ground,” says Hofmann. “The potential for harm becomes harder to see. It’s way off in the distance, you can no longer really imagine it. And when you lose the perception of harm, you’re more likely to take risks.”

The team’s findings, published in The Journal of Applied Psychology, have important implications for organizations.

The rise of remote work and AI means that more complex, high-risk systems are being monitored from many miles away, widening the gap between the people (or technology) calling the shots and the consequences of those calls. Hofmann says the onus is on organizations to close that gap and keep workers connected to the human impact of their decisions.

A moral responsibility or somebody else’s problem?

Hofmann’s research sits at the intersection of leadership, organizational culture and high-risk environments. The thread that led to this particular study began when he served on the National Academy of Sciences commission investigating the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. Around the same time, Jonathan Keeney (PhD ’17), then a doctoral student at UNC Kenan-Flagler, was steeped in research on construal level theory.

The psychological concept is straightforward: The more distant something feels, the more abstractly we think about it.

Most prior research points to the advantages of thinking at a more abstract or conceptual level, particularly at the top. And for good reason, says Hofmann. “You want your senior leadership teams thinking abstractly, focused on industry dynamics, competitive advantages, and long-term strategy,” he says. “If they’re just worried about execution tomorrow, you’d tell them to get out of the weeds.”

But Hofmann had a hunch that the same thinking that serves leaders well in the boardroom could be dangerous on the frontlines.

So, he and Keeney, now at Gartner, teamed up with Salvatore Affinito (PhD ’21), another UNC Kenan-Flagler doctoral student who is now an assistant professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and ran a series of studies across three industries: aviation, offshore drilling and healthcare.

In the first, workers at 10 U.S. airports were asked to write about how they promote safety on the job. The researchers found that workers who characterized their jobs in broad, conceptual terms perceived less potential for harm and were less likely to treat safety as an obligation.

Those who described their work in specific, concrete terms perceived more harm and felt a stronger pull to act on it.

The team’s subsequent studies manipulated how workers thought about their jobs. Offshore drilling employees were shown either close-up photos of specific workstations or aerial shots of entire rigs, and asked either how they make safety a priority, to nudge them toward concrete thinking, or why they make safety a priority, to prompt abstract thinking.

Hofmann and his colleagues ran a similar study with healthcare workers, who were shown either individual hospital rooms or bird’s-eye views of a hospital, and told the hospital was either nearby or in Miami. In both cases, workers steered toward abstract thinking perceived less harm and felt less ethical obligation to act on it.

A final study with nurses tested whether abstract thinking changed behavior, not just attitudes and perceptions. The researchers found that nurses who imagined overseeing a distant hospital allocated fewer resources to risk-mitigating measures than those who imagined one close to home.

The pattern held across all the studies, pointing to what Hofmann calls an “unintended consequence” of abstract thinking. “The more abstractly workers think about their jobs, the more likely they are to become desensitized to potential danger,” he says. “And once that happens, safety starts to feel less like a moral responsibility and more like somebody else’s problem.”

Reducing the psychological distance of potential harm

In today’s workplace, that “somebody else” is increasingly far away. AI now monitors data centers and industrial equipment. Engineers troubleshoot pipeline failures from corporate offices in different regions. And safety officers oversee operations on factory floors that they might never set foot on.

To be sure, these arrangements have benefits. They shield employees from dangerous locations and tasks and allow organizations to supervise conditions in hazardous places.

But consider an oil-and-gas employee monitoring an offshore rig from a remote command center, watching feeds from cameras and instruments across four or five screens. The sights, sounds and urgency of the rig are gone. And with that, the sense of what’s happening to the people on it.

Hofmann recalls interviewing a worker who had made the transition from offshore driller to remote monitor and asking how the shift had changed the way he thought about the job. “He told me, ‘It’s interesting how quickly you go native,’” says Hofmann. “‘You forget what it’s like to be out there. You forget the intensity of it.’”

That forgetting carries weight, says Hofmann. Which is why he says organizations can’t leave it to chance. “They have a responsibility to keep risk front and center for people working far from the front lines.”

One of the most effective things organizations can do is build concrete reminders of risk into their cultures.

Take, for instance, the Iron Ring. In 1907, 75 workers died when the Quebec Bridge collapsed during construction. Investigators blamed poor judgment by key engineers. Soon after, Canadian universities established the tradition of giving every new engineering graduate a metal band as a permanent reminder of their obligation to uphold engineering ethics.

Communication tools matter, too. Rather than phone calls or text updates, offshore rigs could use video to help remote workers see and hear the people and environments they are responsible for.

Perhaps most importantly, organizations need to keep the human element visible. Research shows that medical errors decrease when radiologists see a photograph of the patient alongside their scan. “It reduces the psychological distance and makes it more salient that there is a person at the other end of this,” says Hofmann.

Hofmann is especially concerned about AI. As more safety-critical decisions get handed to systems with no firsthand experience of the work, the distance problem takes on a new dimension.

“I don’t believe an AI agent has ever turned a wrench on a drilling platform,” he says. “And I’m not sure how much we can train it to truly understand the potential for harm.”