There is plenty of pressure in life these days. Anyone who has been laid off knows how real the pressure is to find another job. When your boss says, “You’d better get this done by 2 p.m.,” the pressure can be intense, especially when it realistically should take at least until 4 p.m. to complete the job. Making it to work on time; getting your wife to the hospital when the contractions are only a few minutes apart; catching a flight when you left home later than you should have — all these can get our hearts racing and can lead us to cut corners and take risks we would not normally take.
There are other situations in which there really isn’t any pressure, but we can still respond as if there were. For example, when the boss says, “See if you can’t get this done by 2 p.m.,” he or she may be putting the pressure on, or may just be giving you a little pep talk with no intention to make you feel pressured, and yet you still may push yourself and even take risks to make the artificial deadline.
One of the strongest sources of perceived pressure is when you think someone’s life depends on your performance. In the early days of the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) helicopters, there was a very high accident rate. It was discovered that when pilots, who were often veterans of combat in Vietnam, were informed that a baby was dying, they would go into combat mode, with the attitude “you have to go out, but you don’t have to come back.” This led to them taking unreasonable risks with the weather, resulting in the high accident rate. A new policy was put into place in which the pilot would not be given any information about the patient, and, along with other initiatives, this led to a reduction in the number of accidents.
Recently the NTSB said that self-induced pressure may have led experienced pilots to make inappropriate decisions that resulted in accidents. The NTSB was referring to four fatal accidents that occurred in 2007 and 2008. Each pilot was serving as a volunteer for a medical transport flight, and in each case he was considered to be well qualified and experienced for the flight conditions, and yet each made decisions that resulted in a fatal accident.