PCars (and Tee Emm), an interesting and valid view.
I would also agree that the root of the emerging behaviour is in the social climate. As an example see the following from ‘Beyond Feelings’, by Vincent Ruggiero;
"The Influence of Mass Culture”
In centuries past, family and teachers were the dominant, and sometimes the only, influence on children. Today, however, the influence exerted by mass culture (the broadcast media, newspapers, magazines, and popular music) often is greater.
By age eighteen the average teenager has spent 11,000 hours in the classroom and 22,000 hours in front of the television set. He or she has done perhaps 13,000 school lessons, yet has watched more than 750,000, commercials. By age thirty-five the same person has had fewer than 20,000 school lessons, yet has watched approximately 45,000 hours of television and seen close to two million commercials.
What effects does mass culture have on us? To answer, we need only consider the formats and devices commonly used. Modem advertising typically bombards the public with slogans and testimonials by celebrities. This approach is designed to appeal to emotions create artificial needs for products and services. As a result, many people develop the habit of responding emotionally, impulsively and gullibly to such appeals.
Television programmers use frequent scene shifts and sensory appeals such as car crashes, violence, and sexual encounters to keep audience interest from diminishing. Then they add frequent commercial interruptions. This author has studied the attention shifts that television viewers are subjected to. In a dramatic program, for example, attention shifts might include camera angle changes; shifts in story line from one set of characters (or subplot) to another, or from a present scene to a past one (flash back) or to fantasy: and shifts to “newsbreaks,” to commercial breaks, from one commercial to another, and back to the program. Also included are any shifts of attention that occur within commercials. I found as many as 78 shifts per hour, excluding the shifts within commercials. The number of shifts within commercials ranged from 6 to 54 and averaged approximately 17 per fifteen-second commercial. The total number of shifts came out to over 800 attention shifts per hour, or over 14 per minute. A century ago, even uneducated Americans were accustomed to listen attentively to political debates lasting five or six hours. And the speakers used bigger words and longer sentences than are common today. What many people today perceive to be dullness in teachers, text-book authors, and work assignments may actually be their own deficiency. Television viewing (and other modern entertainments) may have prevented them from developing a mature attention span and accepting normal rhythms of life.
Finally, mass culture promotes values that oppose those held by most parents and teachers. Play is presented as more fulfilling than work, self gratification as more desirable than self-control, and materialism as more meaningful than idealism. People who adopt these values with out questioning them may end up sacrificing worthy goals to their pursuit of “a good time” and lots of money.
Re “… of course, dangerously incompetent actions or decisions by the captain must be challenged by the first officer.”
This is a common assumption in CRM and a cornerstone of some monitoring routines, but in modern operations how do we ensure that the first officer has sufficient competence (experience) to intervene without being an eager beaver?
Are many of the challenges or interruptions poorly couched quests for knowledge, lacking, because of the current pressures on training, or due to a covert acceptance of lower standards – a creeping social change?