Do people respond to risk assessments or how risky they feel the work to be?
This study surveyed 120 construction workers to understand their rational & emotional responses to risk.
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Yes – it’s one of those ‘unsafe behaviour’ studies. If this triggers you then, here, play with this balloon 🎈
Extracts:
· it’s “important to understand how risk is perceived because interventions in unsafe or risky behavior heavily rely on a clear understanding of how people think about risk”
· “Both the rational risk perception derived from engineering and the emotional risk perception derived from social sciences can be useful”
· Workers who cannot “be considered as experts in terms of risk management tend to perceive risk in a direct and emotional way”
· They evaluated four types of risk perception – the first three falling under the ‘rational’ type: 1) perceived probability – worker judgement on how likely is the event, 2) perceived severity – how serious the consequences would be, 3) perceived negative utility – combined assessment of probability & severity, 4) direct risk perception – their immediate, intuitive or emotional judgement on how risky something feels
· “The four proposed ways of perceiving risk were related but distinct”
· Perceived probability, perceived severity & perceived negative utility positively influenced direct risk perception
· “Only direct risk perception acted as a common motivator of the two safety behaviors: safety compliance and safety participation”
· “Safety behavior among construction workers relied mainly on emotional risk perception, whereas rational assessment did not influence safety behavior”
· “Individuals’ direct perception of risk in the workplace, compared to perceived risk severity, was a stronger motivator of workers’ safety compliance”
· “The ‘severity’ dimension appears to be more important compared to the probability of risk”
· “Managerial personnel should pay attention to how workers perceive and think about risk”
· “An understanding of how employees perceive risk is critical for managerial personnel to remain aware of potential discrepancies among different parties”
· Authors suggest “Increasing workers’ rational judgment of the likelihood, severity, and negative utility of risk can enhance their emotional risk perception”
· “Experience sharing or accident simulation may be helpful in strengthening emotional perception”
· “Managers should pay more attention to the severity dimension”
· “Workers’ perception of risk deviates significantly from objective statistical data”
· “Workers may not accurately evaluate related risks in the workplace”
Limitations as always
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2017.06.010
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