Are Human Reliability Analysis's Techniques Able to Account for Cultural Dimensions?

Human reliability Analysis (HRA) is a method to evaluate human error risk in critical safety tasks, according to influencing factors such as time available, human-machine interfaces, layout and training. The set of performance influencing factors varies depending on the technique used. Checking the dataset used to validate the quantified relation between human errors and influencing factors, it was noticed that most of the data points were obtained in few countries, especially in the northern hemisphere. Are those relations valid for other countries? Could culture be an influencing factor per se?
There is a way to dimensionalise cultures, according to Hofstede's model (2011), which consists of the measurement of: Power distance index (PDI), Individualism vs collectivism (IDV), Uncertainty avoidance (UAI), Motivation towards Achievement and Success (formerly Masculinity vs femininity - MAS), Long-term orientation (LTO) vs short-term orientation, Indulgence vs restraint (RES). Recent research has found evidence relating two of those outcomes to propensity to trust (PT) with negative effect on safety outcomes in Brazil.
Based on the hypothesis that cultural dimensions can affect some influencing factors, this paper evaluated the correlation of those three Hofstede dimensions from Migueles and Zanini's research (2024) against each performance influencing factor from Petro-HRA, the most used HRA method in oil & gas installations in Brazil in 2024. The authors discuss the importance of extending this study to the original datasets used for HRA before researchers consider creating a new method or an extension of an HRA technique that accounts for culture.

Keywords: Human reliability analysis, Culture, Trust, Performance influencing factors, Safety outcomes.