Psychology Wiki
Register
Advertisement

Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language | Individual differences | Personality | Philosophy | Social |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |

Cognitive Psychology: Attention · Decision making · Learning · Judgement · Memory · Motivation · Perception · Reasoning · Thinking  - Cognitive processes Cognition - Outline Index


For alternate meanings, see: Accident (fallacy), Accident (philosophy), and Car accidents.
Partial stadium collapse at Big12 college football championship - 2005

A railing accidentally collapses at a college football game, spilling fans onto the sidelines

Train wreck at Montparnasse 1895 2

Train wreck at Montparnasse in 1895

An accident is an event that occurs unexpectedly and unintentionally. Physical examples include unintended collisions or falls, being injured by touching something sharp, hot, or electric, or ingesting poison. Non-physical examples are unintentionally revealing a secret or otherwise saying something incorrectly, forgetting an appointment, etc.

50,425 people were killed in accidents (not including car accidents) in the U.S. in 1995, which is 19 people in 100,000.

Often, accidents are investigated so that we can learn how to avoid them in the future. This is sometimes called root cause analysis, but does not generally apply to accidents that cannot be predicted with any certainty. For example, a root cause of a purely random incident may never be identified, and thus future similar accidents remain "accidental."

The informal term "freak accident" may refer to an unfortunate event that may seem exceedingly unlikely to happen by chance. This term may be used to imply doubts about whether the event actually was an accident.

Types of accidents[]


See also[]

External links[]

This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from [[Wikipedia:Accident]|Wikipedia]] (view authors).
Advertisement