It is the human equivalent of fault tolerant design that allows equipment to continue functioning in the presence of hardware faults, such as a "limp-in" mode for an automobile electronics unit that would be employed if something like the oxygen sensor failed.
The practice is known as poka-yoke in Japan where it was introduced by Shigeo Shingo as part of the Toyota Production System.
An example is a checking or confirmation function such as an "Are you sure" dialog box with the harmless option preselected in computer software for an action that could have severe consequences if made in error, such as deleting or overwriting files (although the consequence of inadvertent file deletion has been reduced from the DOS days by a concept like the trash can in Mac OS, which has been introduced in most GUI interfaces).
Adding too great a mitigating factor in some circumstances can become a hindrance, where the confirmation becomes mechanical this may become detrimental - for example, if a prompt is asked for every file in a batch delete, one may be tempted to simply agree to each prompt, even if a file is deleted accidentally.
Searches like this are commonly performed using a combination of edit distance, soundex, and metaphone calculations.