Scared Straight: How to Use Fear in Safety Training

The following is adapted from Rethinking Hand Safety.

Blackened lungs. Patients in hospital beds. Decaying teeth. In the European Union, such images are printed on cigarette boxes to reduce the likelihood of people buying cigarettes. And for many people, it works.

Images are powerful. Even more than mere words, they trigger a visceral response in viewers. They create a spark of fear.

Fear can be a useful tool. But when it comes to safety training, is scaring them straight the answer? Maybe. And maybe not.

Fear is a double-edged sword. It can motivate or distract. It can focus the mind or throw it into denial. It can cause the mind to go into a deliberate, analytic approach or it can produce “deer in the headlights” paralysis. Use fear in the wrong way, and it can definitely backfire. 

You need some fear in safety training, but there are wrong ways to do it and right ways.  

How Not to Use Fear

The biggest issue with fear in safety training is that it is not properly focused. Instead of employing fear to achieve a certain goal—like ensuring that workers wear the proper safety gloves—the fear is a general, amorphous feeling. Trainers are trying to scare workers to emphasize the importance of the training, yet they are not connecting that fear to clear, actionable, preventative measures. The result is that “deer in the headlights” paralysis instead of safer behavior.

Here are four rules, based on long experience at leading companies, for how not to use fear:

Rule #1: Never show a picture of a horribly mangled body part without it being specifically relevant to the machinery or tasks of the audience. Generic pictures are a bad idea, as they create free-floating anxiety, with no solution.

Rule #2: Never show a graphic photo without immediately offering the safe, secure alternative practice to prevent it. The worker needs to believe that the proposed behavior is actually effective and that they have the ability to do it. Otherwise, the mind will go into denial, and the topic will be avoided altogether.

Rule #3: Never show the result of a very recent injury, in which the audience might know the person, relatives of the person, or friends of the person involved. This will be seen, rightly, as a terrible violation of personal privacy. If someone in the audience saw the accident, it may also trigger a kind of PTSD.

Rule #4: Never post a graphic photo of an injury next to the machine at which it occurred. Graphic photos on cigarette cartons work partly because people don’t have to smoke. Actually posting photos next to machines people have to use will cause a very different, and bad, reaction. It will cause nonstop anxiety, which will not lead to safety, but to mental blocks. Indeed, people will block out that image in order to do the work, and it will become counterproductive over time. You can use such an image in training, but not permanently on display. This is especially bad if you forget rule 2 above, and don’t show the right way to do the job safely. 

That’s a lot of “nevers,” and it might lead you to believe that you should never use graphic, disturbing images at all. In truth, fear, even horror, can and should be a vital part of creating believability for warnings. You shouldn’t banish horrible pictures from your training sessions; you should just use them in the right way.

The Right Way to Use Fear

Believability in safety training is vital because humans have a natural tendency to think that bad things will not happen to them personally. Seeing a picture of a mangled hand associated with a particular task can make a worker finally believe that it’s possible, there’s a real threat, and might happen to them.

Pictures really are worth a thousand words. In a way, with a picture, a worker can experience the consequences of an accident without having to go through an accident—thereby changing behavior.

In an industrial setting, believability is especially important for long-term, cumulative injuries, like the hand-arm vibration syndrome (HAVS), chemical exposures, and the like.

To effectively create believability, follow these three additional rules:

Rule #1: As part of creating believability, it’s important that your graphic examples be drawn from ethnic, cultural, and gender groups similar to your workers. Because of the powerful denial factor in the human psyche, if you only see that someone from another race or culture was injured, you are that much less likely to believe that it could be you.

Rule #2: Your horror stories must include the long-term consequences of an injury. This includes repeated surgeries, family consequences, and the like. Part of your job in safety training is to combat the idea that an injury is a one-off terrible event that happens, and then it’s over.

Rule #3: It’s important to rotate out horrible images used in training. Seeing the same image over and over will cause people to block it out and ignore it.

The Goal of Safety Training Is… Safety

The goal of safety training is, of course, greater safety. You want to scare workers straight, not scare them to petrified inaction.

If you want to hammer in a nail, you’re not going to swing the hammer around wildly. You’re going to hit the nail on the head. It’s the same when you want to drive home a point. You don’t want general anxiety; you want clear, targeted fear to create believability. In this way, you can accomplish the foundational goal of safety training: better safety.

For more advice on safety training, you can find Rethinking Hand Safety on Amazon.

Joe Geng grew up among the tanneries of Canada helping his father make gloves, and he has spent his entire life studying industrial hand safety, overseeing glove R&D, and consulting with leading companies like Toyota, Honda, SpaceX, General Motors, Bombardier Aircraft, and Shell Oil. He presently acts as vice president at Superior Glove, the Geng family business that is considered one of the world’s most innovative and disruptive glove manufacturers. Superior is a major global supplier to aerospace, automotive, oil & gas, and construction companies, and has been named one of Canada’s best-managed companies seven years in a row by Deloitte. Joe holds degrees from Trinity Western University and attended Reutlingen leather school in Germany.