ABSTRACT
Readers all react to failure. In fact, our reactions to failure often make that readers see human error as the cause of a mishap; they promote the bad apple theory. Failure, or people doing things with the potential for failure, is generally not something readers expect to see. Reactions to failure, such as in the example, share the following features: Retrospective, Proximal, Counterfactual, and Judgmental. Reactions to failure focus firstly and predominantly on those people who were closest to producing and to potentially avoiding the mishap. Looking for sources of failure far away from people at the sharp end is counterintuitive. Failures offer them a window through which they can see the true internal workings of the system that produced the incident or accident. People and organizations often want the surprise in the failure to go away, and with it the challenge to the views and beliefs.
