Diane Vaughan > Quotes

“Mourning is essential to uncoupling, as it is to any significant leavetaking. Uncoupling is a transition into a different lifestyle, a change of life course which, whether we recognize and admit it in the early phases or not, is going to be made without the other person. We commit ourselves to relationships expecting them to last, however. In leaving behind a significant person who shares a portion of our life, we experience a loss.”
― Diane Vaughan, Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships

“To speak of a communication failure implies a breakdown of some sort. Yet this does not accurately portray what occurs. In truth, communication difficulties arise not from breakdown but from the characteristics of the system itself. Despite promising beginnings in our intimate relationships, we tend over time to evolve a system of communication that suppresses rather than reveals information. Life is complicated, and confirming or disconfirming the well-being of a relationship takes effort. Once we are comfortably coupled, the intense, energy-consuming monitoring of courtship days is replaced by a simpler, more efficient method. Unable to witness our partners’ every activity or verify every nuance of meaning, we evolve a communication system based on trust. We gradually cease our attentive probing, relying instead on familiar cues and signals to stand as testament to the strength of the bond: the words “I love you,” holidays with the family, good sex, special times with shared friends, the routine exchange, “How was your day?” We take these signals as representative of the relationship and turn our monitoring energies elsewhere.
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Not only do the initiator’s negative signals tend to become incorporated into the existing routine, but, paradoxically, the initiator actively contributes to the impression that life goes on as usual. Even as they express their unhappiness, initiators work at emphasizing and maintaining the routine aspects of life with the other person, simultaneously giving signals that all is well. Unwilling to leave the relationship yet, they need to privately explore and evaluate the situation. The initiator thus contrives an appearance of participation,7 creating a protective cover that allows them to “return” if their alternative resources do not work out.
Our ability to do this—to perform a role we are no longer enthusiastically committed to—is one of our acquired talents. In all our encounters, we present ourselves to others in much the same way as actors do, tailoring our performance to the role we are assigned in a particular setting.8 Thus, communication is always distorted. We only give up fragments of what really occurs within us during that specific moment of communication.9 Such fragments are always selected and arranged so that there is seldom a faithful presentation of our inner reality. It is transformed, reduced, redirected, recomposed.10 Once we get the role perfected, we are able to play it whether we are in the mood to go on stage or not, simply by reproducing the signals.
What is true of all our encounters is, of course, true of intimate relationships. The nature of the intimate bond is especially hard to confirm or disconfirm.11 The signals produced by each partner, while acting out the partner role, tend to be interpreted by the other as the relationship.12 Because the costs of constantly checking out what the other person is feeling and doing are high, each partner is in a position to be duped and misled by the other.13 Thus, the initiator is able to keep up appearances that all is well by falsifying, tailoring, and manipulating signals to that effect. The normal routine can be used to attest to the presence of something that is not there. For example, initiators can continue the habit of saying, “I love you,” though the passion is gone. They can say, “I love you” and cover the fact that they feel disappointment or anger, or that they feel nothing at all. Or, they can say, “I love you” and mean, “I like you,” or, “We have been through a lot together,” or even “Today was a good day.”
― Diane Vaughan, Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships

“Uncoupling is a dramatic life event, whose importance is reflected in the eagerness of people to discuss their relationships even years later. Indeed, in attempting to put the story in chronological order, there was no one who was not visited again by sorrow and loss in the telling of it, regardless of the passage of time.”
― Diane Vaughan

“We just remained very calm and for the first time talked about separating. We spent like a month and a half together after that, and then moved out simultaneously from the apartment to different places on the same day. We even said, look, you know, you’re not going to leave me, I’m not going to leave you. we’ll just move out on the same day. It was apparent that we were both ready to do this. When the time came I helped her move some of her things and she helped me move some of my things. The feeling between us was almost like lovers who for some reason had to leave each other. The night that we said goodbye—it was like 11 o’clock and the house was empty. Everything had been put into trucks and moved and so forth and we were in the house and there was no place else to go and so we sat down on the floor and laying down on the floor in our overcoats and I held her and we both cried and it was just heartrending and then we just separated and that was pretty much it. [SUPERVISOR, AGE 38, DIVORCED AFTER 19 YEARS]”
― Diane Vaughan, Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships

“Then I didn’t think much about it, I just did it. I started wearing some of the things he left behind, especially his bathrobe, some shirts too, but only in the house. I read his books, I am embarrassed at this. I also did some things to the place I knew he would like. He always complained about my plants, so I got rid of them. It seems strange to think about it now, but at the time I found some comfort in it. [ACCOUNTANT, AGE 38, SEPARATED AFTER LIVING TOGETHER 13 YEARS]”
― Diane Vaughan, Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships

“I knew that I was in better shape than she was because I was the one who pushed for the split. Still, even a year later I was still very vulnerable to her actions. If I saw her at the supermarket, or someone brought her name up, or if she called about something, which she seemed to do pretty often—like she was trying to find stuff to talk to me about, did I see the exhibit, so-and-so called, the dog got sick, you know—I was always upset by it, by talking to her, being reminded of her. I just wanted it to be over and it just took a long time for that to happen, for that connection to be broken. [DENTAL ASSISTANT, AGE 27, SEPARATED AFTER LIVING TOGETHER 3 YEARS]”
― Diane Vaughan, Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships

“This paradox—a worldview that survives despite evidence that repeatedly challenges its basic assumptions—is well known among researchers interested in the sociology of science and technology, who often have noted the “obduracy” of established perspectives or paradigms in the face of anomalous information.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“The designer or his client has to choose in what degree and where there shall be failure.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Anybody can write an ECR. It has to be formally dispositioned. There is no ducking it. Thiokol has a similar system. All the aerospace contractors have this approach.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Decision making is more an example of rule following than of calculation of costs and benefits.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Thus, external regulators frequently become dependent on the regulated organization for information and its interpretation.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Alone, however, the social affirmation and commitment generated as work group decisions were processed are insufficient to explain the normalization of deviance. The culture of production and structural secrecy were environmental and organizational contingencies that caused the work group culture to persist.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Karl Weick observes that whenever people act in a context of choice, irreversible action, and public awareness, their actions tend to become binding;9 they become committed to their actions, then develop valid, socially acceptable justifications. Committed action, justifications, and meaning become linked. Actions “mean” whatever justifications become attached to them.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Safety, too, is integral to the engineering worldview. Engineers design to avoid failure.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“C 1 item.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“STS-1 affirmed these choices and what was to become the dominant ideology of the work group in the years preceding the Challenger tragedy: the belief in redundancy.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Uncoupling is primarily a tale of two transitions: one that begins before the other. Most often, one person wants out while the other person wants the relationship to continue. Although both partners must go through all the same stages of the transition in order to uncouple, the transition begins and ends at different times for each. By the time the still-loving partner realizes the relationship is in serious trouble, the other person is already gone in a number of ways. The rejected partner then embarks on a transition that the other person began long before.”
― Diane Vaughan, Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships

“The second factor reinforcing work group decision making was structural secrecy: patterns of information, the organizational structure, and the structure of regulatory relations perpetuated the normalization of deviance.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“The structure of regulatory relations created obstacles to social control, limiting information and knowledge about the O-ring problems. It inhibited the ability of safety regulators to alter the scientific paradigm on which the belief in acceptable risk was based.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“This is the problem of the normalization of deviance. Three factors, with which we will be occupied throughout this book, explain the normalization of deviance: the production of a work group culture, the culture of production, and structural secrecy.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Attesting to the nested quality of culture, NASA’s entire Shuttle Program exhibited the “unruly technology” that characterizes the engineering craft when complex technical systems are involved: interpretive flexibility, absence of appropriate guidelines, unexpected glitches as commonplace, “debugging through use,” extensive systemwide problems with technical components, practical rules based on experience that supplemented and took precedence in technical decision making over formal, universal rules, and cost/safety compromises as taken-for-granted.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“My concern always has been with how—not why—people make transitions out of relationships. Many times the people I talked to did not understand why themselves. Even when they thought they knew, the reasons changed, so that what seemed to explain it at one time often did not seem important six months later.”
― Diane Vaughan, Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships

“...for no matter whether the relationship was of short or long duration, no matter whether the partners were rich or poor, gay or straight, young or old, living together or married, giving up the relationship was hard for both people.”
― Diane Vaughan, Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships

“The shared official construction of risk is particularly interesting in light of the way understanding varied with position in the organizational structure”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Solutions are always a compromise among a number of standard requirements: safety; reliability; long-term economy; minimum of labor; practicality; ease of manufacturing and installation, maintenance, and operation; and aesthetics.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Going public with our opinions and actions commits us to our positions because we create an audience with expectations about our future behavior based on our present stand. To behave contrary to these expectations requires us to back down from previous positions, sometimes causing us to lose face.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Failure is inherent in all useful design not only because all requirements of economy derive from insatiable wishes, but more immediately because certain quite specific conflicts are inevitable once requirements for economy are admitted; and conflicts even among the requirements of use are not unknown.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“According to Clarke, a disqualification heuristic is an “ideological mechanism or mind-set that leads experts and decision makers to neglect information that contradicts a conviction—in this case, a conviction that a sociotechnical system is safe.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“They do not weigh all possible outcomes but instead rely on a few key values. The magnitude of possible bad outcomes is more salient, so that there is less risk taking when greater stakes are involved. But even then, they do not quantify and calculate: they “feel it,” because quantifying costs and benefits is not easy.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Peter Berger notes that the events that constitute our lives are subject to many interpretations, not just by outsiders, but by ourselves.7 When an unexpected event occurs, we need to explain it not only to others, but to ourselves.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA