Thomas Schares, MD, MBA, an anesthesiologist with Somnia Anesthesia who serves as chief of anesthesiology for Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, Calif., discusses the phenomenon known as ...

The shortcut has been in our psyche since most of us can remember. It often is a deviation from the conventional as a means to get somewhere or do something to save time. Time is precious, and ...

The old adage, "familiarity breeds contempt," rings eerily true when considering the dangers of normalizing deviance. Coined by sociologist Diane Vaughan, this phenomenon describes the gradual process ...

Have you ever cut a corner, perhaps not using a checklist, or skipping a preflight, and then caught yourself doing it again? Nothing bad happened the first time, but that was the beginning of the ...

We’ve all seen it: A deviant behavior is repeated, without catastrophic results, and eventually becomes the accepted social norm for the organization. This process is called the “normalization of ...

When the sociologist Diane Vaughan came up with the term “the normalization of deviance,” she was referring to NASA administrators’ disregard of the flaw that caused the Challenger space shuttle to ...

Most pilots have probably heard the story from Greek mythology about Icarus, the ancient aviator who flew too close to the sun and came crashing down into the sea. Since it was Daedalus, his father, ...

In the aftermath of the exposure and resignation of Rep. Anthony Weiner. D-N.Y., from Congress, his colleagues, some journalists, ethicists and pundits are trying to sort out what it means. Has a new ...