Psychological Antecedents of Risk-Taking Behavior in Construction

Despite strong advancements in construction safety performance over the past few decades, injuries still occur at an unacceptable rate. Researchers have shown that risk-taking behavior, originating mainly from inaccurate perception and unacceptable tolerance of safety risk, is a significant factor in a majority of construction injuries. Based on psychology research that suggests cognitive interactions between emotions and risk perception, the hypothesis was formed that there are objectively measureable differences in construction safety risk perception between people in different emotional states. To test this hypothesis, a controlled experiment was designed and conducted that (1) induced various positive and negative emotions in 69 subjects using validated movie excerpts; (2) measured emotional states using a validated post-film questionnaire; (3) exposed participants to construction hazards within a high fidelity virtual environment; and (4) measured subjects’ perceptions of the risk related to these hazards adopting a validated frequency-severity-based questionnaire. Once these data were collected, a principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to identify uncorrelated groups of related emotions. A Kruskal-Wallis test followed by multiple Mann-Whitney U tests was then used to test for differences in risk perception between participants belonging to these different emotional groups. The results of these analyses indicated that the mild negative group (sad and unhappy subjects) and the intense negative group (fearful, anxious, and disgusted subjects) perceived statistically significantly (p=0.003) more risk than the positive group (happy, amused, joyful, and interested subjects). The two negative groups were also found to perceive more risk than the neutral group (p<0.02). However, no statistically significant difference in risk perception was found between the positive and neutral groups or between the two negative groups. According to situational awareness literature, the implication of these findings is that individuals in positive and neutral emotional states may be more prone to engage in risk-taking behaviors than their counterparts because they perceive less risk in the same environment.