This was really interesting. It studied how emotional states can influence hazard perception, assessment of safety risk and decision making in a simulated construction environment.
73 participants were involved in the experiment. I can’t describe the whole protocol, nor the findings, however participants navigated a high-fidelity virtual construction environment with different work activities. Once they approached the various elements, a real picture was displayed which had real hazards. Positive or negative emotional states were altered via film clips of a traumatic experience and also a funny comedic skit.
First the authors provide a theoretical background on hazard perception, emotional states and decision making. Previous research has highlighted that construction workers were able to identify only half of the hazards in their environment, and in another study detect and communicate only up to 38% of the hazards. It’s said that these findings suggest that rather than workers being deliberate risk takers that they may largely have issues in identifying hazards which then results in a misestimation of risk.
For emotions, positive emotions are ones that characterise happiness, activeness or enthusiasm whereas negative emotions are characterised by unpleasant or unsettling experiences. Positive emotions tend to lead to more optimistic evaluations of risk, negative emotions are associated with more risk aversion (p.2).
Emotional responses to risk is an important consideration in decision making and comes under the “risk as feelings” concept that suggests responses to risky situations result strongly from emotional influences rather than just cognitive ones. That is, “people’s feelings can have an independent and potentially stronger influence on their behaviors and decisions than their objective assessments … [meaning] that there are circumstances where behavior may not be congruent with what a person objectively computes is the best course of action” (p.2).
Results
Some key findings were:
- As subjects identified more hazards they reported a higher negative emotional experience.
- However, the hazards identified didn’t significantly influence their positive emotional experience, suggesting that “identifying and engaging with hazards can be characterized as a negative emotional experience” (p7).
- The total number of hazards in the environment (i.e. the total number that *could* have been identified even if they were not identified by that subject) explained both positive and negative emotional experiences. Such that as the total number of hazards in the photos increased, the positive emotional experience decreased and negative experience decreased irrespective of whether the hazards were explicitly identified.
- This suggests that “people may have an intuitive sense of a more dangerous work environment, even if they are unable to objectively ascertain the dangers” (p8).
- The overall danger assessment was found to increase as the number of hazards were identified by subjects and also as the total number of hazards in the environment increases. These findings support the mechanisms that people rely on intuitive reasoning/gut-feelings “as a primary driver of danger assessment” (p8).
- Safety decisions are strongly influenced by the *total* number of hazards in the environment and an increased perception of danger results in a tendency for more risk-averse decisions, however no significant relationship was found between safety decisions and the number of hazards identified by the subjects.
In discussing the findings, they state that preliminary evidence that emotions rather than objective evaluations may be the primary driver of safety-related decision making.
Both the number of hazards identified by participants and the total number of hazards in the environment directly influenced assessments of risk, it was only the total number that was strongly associated with safety decisions and this was independent of the number of hazards identified by subjects.
As noted above, because the number of hazards ID by subjects didn’t directly influence their final safety decision it’s said to support the intuitive gut feeling assessments over objective assessments. Gut feelings, often made unconsciously, allow rapid and beneficial decisions but they can also be subject to biases and influences.
The authors argue that safety training programs and interventions need to focus on developing people’s understanding “over persuasion or literal memorization of facts to promote insightful intuition” (p9); that is, facilitating reasoning skills to automatically and unconsciously identify cues in the environment over the rote learning of rules and regulations.
Even though the emotional manipulation protocol (using videos) didn’t alter hazard recognition of subjects (which may have been as a result of the videos themselves), the total number of hazards themselves in the environment did elicit changes in emotional states, whether subjects identified them or not. Thus, training, coaching and simulation sessions should focus on “generating targeted context-driven emotions to alter perception and behavior on construction sites to cultivate risk-averse practices”, since negative emotional evaluations can “heighten the perception of danger and promote more risk-averse decision making” (p9).
It’s stated that the above focus in training, instruction, simulation etc. is furthermore important since many conventional approaches in construction training “has implicitly operated under the assumption that the process of identifying, assessing, and responding to dangers in the workplace is based on skill and rationality” (p10), which these findings counter.
Finally, it’s said that these findings have “validated the risk-as-feelings hypothesis that emotional evaluations can diverge from cognitive evaluations” (p.10) and that cognitive evaluations of behaviour or mediated to some degree by affective responses (emotional).
Authors: Siddharth Bhandari, M.ASCE; Matthew R. Hallowell, M.ASCE; Leaf Van Boven; Keith M. Welker; Mani Golparvar-Fard, M.ASCE; and June Gruber, 2020, J. Constr. Eng. Manage
Study link: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%29CO.1943-7862.0001755
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/using-augmented-virtuality-examine-how-emotions-risk-ben-hutchinson
SafetyInsights.org 