Steven Kass, PhD

Dr. Steven Kass, professor, teaches industrial and organizational psychology, human factors, training and development in the workplace, and psychology of learning.

Kass is a researcher in the psychology department who studies human factors (interaction between people and systems), primarily issues of attention including boredom, distracted driving, and situation awareness.

His interest in situation awareness derived from the research he conducted as a graduate student at the Institute for Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida in the early 90’s. Over the years, Kass has expanded this line of research by conducting numerous studies investigating the impact distractions, such talking on a mobile phone, on a person’s ability to drive. He was first author on the study “The Effects of Distraction and Experience on Situation Awareness and Simulated Driving,” published in the Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behavior.

In 2013, the Transportation and Highway Safety Subcommittee of the Florida House of Representatives invited Kass to present information on distracted driving before drafting a bill to ban texting while driving. In the future, he hopes to explore the impact of situation awareness on performance in health care professions.

He was a keynote speaker at the 60th annual meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association in Hilton Head, South Carolina in 2015. Before coming to UWF in 1998, he was a research psychologist for the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division and an adjunct instructor at the University of Central Florida and Valencia Community College in Orlando.

He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Florida, master’s in industrial and organizational psychology from UWF, and doctorate in human factors psychology from the University of Central Florida.