All accidents and incidents at the workplace, and the resulting consequences, are tied to human beings and their actions. Although their avoidance has been a crucial part of training in aviation for the past twenty years, it has been largely ignored in many other occupations with team structures similar to those in aviation. In such professions and workplaces, those involved are under high stress, with enormous workloads, simultaneously completing mental and motor tasks, facing unexpected situations involving great risk, and with uncertain final outcomes.

The goal of researchers is to find ways to minimize human error and to understand the interaction amongst the members of the team fulfilling the task. Specialized training programmes, good management and clear rules that lay out which member is responsible for making decisions can be the first steps to reducing and managing such errors.

This book is a major result of the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation's 6th Berlin Colloquium, Interaction in High Risk Environments, hosted in 2002 by the Psycholinguistic Group of the Humbolt University Institute for German Language and Linguistics. This group is affiliated with the ongoing research group Group Interaction in High Risk Environments (GIHRE) sponsored by the Foundation based in Ladenburg, Germany. The Colloquium brings together experts from aerospace, clinical medicine, nuclear power, psychology, linguistics and psycholinguistics, to include fields that have yet to be a major focus of scientific investigations.

Together, the authors explore scientific advances with direct application to a range of high risk environments. The aim is to address the issues and root causes of error and lack of teamwork by combining the knowledge of scientific experts with experience gained in different fields of industry and public life. Chapters span space travel, risk in the cockpit, safety in medicine, nuclear submarine salvage, large construction sites, police conflict management and communication in disaster relief. Despite this diversity, contributions share a common thread: the importance of human beings in everyday situations which require implicit trust as airplane passengers, medical patients, highway users and where safety often depends on the ability to communicate and interact.

Readers working in safety-critical professional fields will find value in the case descriptions, the academic synthesis of the similarities between examples and ways to approach new challenges. Specialists in applied psychology, human factors and technical management will also gain new insights.