safety-bias

A safety-bias is a human-made systematic error in safety judgment where decision-makers overweight readily available, vivid, or emotionally salient hazards while underweighting statistically more significant but less visible risks. It manifests through cognitive shortcuts — availability heuristic, representativeness heuristic, affect heuristic — that distort risk perception and lead to misallocation of safety resources. The mechanism persists through institutional practices: incident investigation protocols that focus on high-profile events, safety metrics that reward visibility over statistical rigor, and organizational narratives that amplify rare catastrophic scenarios. Carved by its cognitive mechanisms (heuristics that distort probability assessment) and its persistence mechanism (institutional practices and decision frameworks that encode biased risk perception). [formal: bias cognitiva | substrate: mind | horizon: hours | explicit: no | epoch: 0.01]