Human Error

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Human Error
Message posted by Susan (via 137.151.193.28) on December 26, 2001 at 3:08 PM (ET)

My question is: Are there any statistics published about how often human error occurs? For example, a person makes a mistake a work. People always say, "well, you are human and humans make mistakes." Something has come up at work and I am being negatively evaluated. I have made an error on three e-mail messages that I have sent to students. They are closer to typos, I left out a word and a misunderstanding occurred. I have answered 21,000 e-mails in the last year. To me, three errors (whether I agree with the term in this case) out of 21,000 seems pretty small. These are not life or death issues and I think a less perfectionist boss would see that typos occur all the time even in her letters.

What would be the percentage of human error in a work place environment?

Thank you!

READERS RESPOND:
(In chronological order. Most recent at the bottom.)

Re: Human Error
Message posted by JG (via 128.8.23.75) on December 27, 2001 at 12:40 AM (ET)

There is a tremendous literature on this topic, but you need to be more specific on who, what, where, and when you are talking about. For instance, human error as a cause of automobile accidents or comparing young males with young females in automobile accident statistics.
Also, in statistics we have alpha and beta error, that is being too careful vs. not careful enough.

Re: Human Error
Message posted by Darius (via 200.23.217.10) on December 27, 2001 at 9:57 AM (ET)

I don愒 know any statistics about human error, but as a process 3 out of 21,000 individuals or 3/21000*1000000= 143 defects per million, you have a teorical cpk (with two tails, normally distributed, centered and stable) of 1.28.

cpk less than 1, the process is not capable and not performing within tolerances.

cpk greater than 1, the process is capable and performing within tolerances.

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