“When the sociologist Diane Vaughan came up with the term ‘the normalization of deviance,’ she was referring to NASA administrators’ disregard of the flaw that caused the Challenger space shuttle to ...

Normalization of deviance is the phenomenon where minor deviations from acceptable standards become regular practice, leading to a dangerous downward spiral of performance and increased accident risk ...

The loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 is usually ascribed to NASA's decision to accept a safety risk to meet a launch schedule. Vaughan, a professor of sociology at Boston College, argues ...