The writer of this article has been going through hell for the last and a half month. After having her arm dislocated (once again) she managed to have her car damaged due to adulterated fuel with which her fuel tank was filled in a transaction she wasn’t even present...What's more, her computer crashed two days before the submission of a 5,000-word-essay on which she had been working one month and, as you perfectly guessed, the essay was lost. Bad luck? Not exactly.
According to two psychological theories, the Accident-Proneness Theory and the Theory of Unconscious Motivation, the writer most probably belongs to a group of individuals who are bound to incur accidents, also known as so-called accident-prone individuals!
The Accident-Proneness Theory
It's important to stress that this constitutes the most popular theory among accident theories. This theory explicitly states that there are people who – whether they approve of it or not – will be involved in accidents because they have innate predisposition to certain traits that are linked to these unfortunate events.
This specific theory was popularized by the work of Greenwood and Woods: they first noticed that a minority of workers were responsible for many accidents among groups of female munition workers during the First World War.
Later, Newbold confirmed the findings of Greenwood and Woods in a series of papers, around 1926. Specifically, she investigated accident-room attendances based on 22 factories, 8,962 workers and 16,188 accidents and she discovered that a tiny percentage of workers were responsible for the vast majority of accidents. Moreover, she found a correlation of the accidents with age and experience, i.e. the older and more experienced the workers were, the less accident-prone they appeared. The results between males and females were statistically insignificant: men and women were equally affected.
In the same context, Meninger (1938) mentioned the existence of individuals with a suicidal behavior. Similarly, Whitlock and Broadhurst (1968) investigated the frequency of violent events in individuals who had attempted to commit suicide in the past and it was concluded that these people had a greater frequency of accident involvement.
The Theory of Unconscious Motivation
On the other hand, the Theory of Unconscious Motivation constitutes a significant part of Sigmund Freud’s entire theoretical foundation. The basis of this theory holds that adult motivations stem from childhood experiences; they are said to be based on primary drives. These primary drives are biological in nature including eating, drinking and sexual behavior.
Freud stated that at each stage of development, when these drives took on different forms, conflicts arose and these required resolution before the individual was able to move on to the next stage. If the conflict was too traumatic or too difficult for the individual to cope with in an adaptive manner, Freud theorized they would use defense mechanisms or non-adaptive coping mechanisms geared towards pushing the conflict from the conscious mind to the unconscious and thereby ridding the individual of the accompanying anxiety.
Defense mechanisms may become the individual's primary mode of coping, beginning as early as childhood such that under stressful circumstances, the young child may learn to “hide” stress or conflict within their unconscious. The most important of these drives, according to Freud’s theory, is the sexual drive, which many believe cannot be expressed in an acceptable manner due to actual or imaginary fears and, therefore, it becomes repressed. Nevertheless, sexual urges like all other repressed material, occasionally appear briefly, taking the form of slips of the tongue, dreams or illogical behavior.
Subsequently, each time an accident occurs, it is attributed to processes taking place at an unconscious level due to emotions or drives such as guilt, aggression, stress, or ambition among others which result from a deeply buried (repressed) conflict that was never resolved satisfactorily. The accident-prone individual is a person who has not freed themselves from the negativity of feelings like the ones described because they have never been capable of facing and dealing with the originally repressed conflict. This manifests in the form of accidents. For some, these feelings can become so intense that they will render a person susceptible to engaging in accidents which are actually expressions of the unresolved conflict. Freudian theory holds that this will continue until the person successfully deals with the conflict; if they are unable to do so, they may end up seriously injured or even dead!
Theories in Dispute: Where is the Evidence?
Despite its draw, the Theory of Unconscious Motivation, like the whole psychoanalytic theory, lacks the scientific elements that will render it more reliable. It is impossible to determine whether conflicts exist at an unconscious level which are accounting for individuals' accidents as there is no technique accepted as valid and reliable for accessing the unconscious. Therefore, the whole theory is debatable.
In addition, Freud has been fiercely criticized for his focus on human sexuality: almost all contemporary psychoanalysts have differentiated themselves from his theory and distanced themselves from the concept that sexual gratification is the root of all problems.
As far as the Accident-Proneness Theory is concerned, again this theory has not been proven consistently and lacks empirical evidence. Furthermore, where empirical evidence does exist, it accounts for a negligible minority of accidents and the results are not statistically significant.
In any case, both theories are thought-provoking and challenging, warranting further examination in regards to why certain people seem to have frequent accidents.
Sources:
- MSc in Emergency Planning Management (2011), Research Methods in Risk, Crisis and Disaster Management, University of Leicester: Civil Safety and Security Unit.
Stavroula Dimitropoulos - MSc, BSc
