By: Rebecca Ciganek EHS Director
Optimism bias.
It’s the belief that bad things happen to other people, not to me, that they somehow caused the incident because they made a decision we’d never make. That’s where it starts to drift.
On a construction site, it shows up like this:
- “It just takes a second.”
- “I’ve been doing this a long time.”
- “We’ve always done it this way.”
And most of the time… nothing does happen. That’s the problem.
People who get hurt didn’t wake up planning to make the wrong call, they were doing what felt routine, what felt justified in the moment, what they had seen work before.
And that’s the part worth paying attention to, the gap between what we think we would do, and what people actually do when time is tight, pressure is high, and the situation feels familiar.
That gap is where optimism bias lives.
Why It’s a Problem
Construction doesn’t forgive assumptions.
The risk doesn’t go away because you’ve done it before, you’re good at what you do, or nothing’s happened yet. It’s still there, every time. But optimism changes how that risk is perceived. What should feel like a decision starts to feel routine, and hazards are accepted as less serious because the outcome has always been fine. Overtime, and to those watching (learning the trade) unsafe work practices become the unintentional standard.
Where Experience Comes In
In theory, experience should make things safer, but it can only go one of two ways:
- Modifying behavior for best practices
- Reinforcing optimism bias.
The more times something “works” by not following safe practices, the more confidence it builds that it will keep working. Not because the risk is gone but because the outcome hasn’t caught up to the behavior. That’s where experience can quietly shift from being a strength to being a blind spot.
The Part That Carries Forward
People don’t learn from policies. They learn from what they see.
The world has changed and what used to be taught at home with time to explain the “why” behind the “how”, now happens on the jobsite, where production matters, time is limited, and the learning style isn’t considered. That means newer workers learn their approach to safety from how experienced people approach safety: what gets followed and what doesn’t. Over time, best practice or optimism bias will become the learner’s baseline.
Good or bad, those habits don’t stay in one place. They move with people from job to job, crew to crew. Which means experience carries with it great responsibility. Experience should raise the standard, not lower it.
Others are learning from the way we work and what we do does not stay with us, people carry it with them. Over time, what’s modeled becomes the baseline, either best practice or optimism bias, and that difference is what determines how safely the work gets done.