💡 I learned a new term this week: possibility bias.

It’s when the fact that something could go wrong starts to overshadow the question of how likely it is to happen.

And I immediately thought: wow, this describes a fair number of topics in the exoskeleton field.

The pattern often goes something like this:

We can imagine a mechanism by which X could cause harm, therefore we treat X as meaningfully dangerous—even when there’s little or no evidence that this actually occurs (or is expected to occur).

Clearly, thinking through possible risks is important. Especially when using new or emerging tech like exoskeletons and exosuits that physically interact with people.

But there’s a big difference between:

“Could this theoretically happen?”

and

“How often does this actually happen? How large is the effect? And what does the evidence tell us about the real-world risk?”

I've had a number of private convos with researchers, industry professionals, and practitioners recently that have made me think possibility bias is more prevalent across our field than we'd like to admit.

I think this is a slightly uncomfortable conversation that we've shied away from in both academic and standards development communities.

As primary questions get answered, we naturally start probing secondary and tertiary questions. But sometimes that progression takes us toward increasingly remote or hypothetical problems.

Quite candidly, it’s something I've struggled with more and more through my own participation in standards committees. Sometimes it's difficult to know whether we're proactively addressing real-world problems or sometimes chasing theoretical ghosts built on hypothetical narratives.

And increasingly, I’ve come to believe there’s more of the latter than we acknowledge.

Standards have an important role in identifying hazards and protecting people. But they also need to mature alongside any emerging tech or field. I don't think we want them to be too proactive or too reactive.

Currently, I worry we're giving too much weight to plausible-but-unsubstantiated risks. In doing so, we can inadvertently spend large amounts of collective time and energy developing ways to address (or test for) problems that are exceedingly rare, or may not meaningfully exist, in practice.

Then assumptions can become embedded in standards or academic literature, where a theoretical concern can start to look like an established fact.

As exos continue to mature, I think we need to be more disciplined about distinguishing theoretical risks from demonstrated risks and making sure our response is proportional to the evidence.

Possibility ≠ probability.

Possibility bias is a useful new term (at least for me) and an under-discussed challenge for the #exoskeleton field as we distinguish the risks we can imagine from the risks the evidence actually supports.

I’m guessing there are some strong opinions on this one. Agree or disagree? Drop a comment or shoot me a DM.