The role of socio-cognitive process in construction workers' safety behaviors

Despite continuous efforts to reduce its number of accidents, construction still remains one of the most hazardous industries in most countries. The vast majority of accidents in construction are associated with workers’ unsafe behaviors. As a result, researchers and practitioners have devoted considerable effort to investigating various approaches to reduce workers’ unsafe behaviors. Still, a noticeable lack of research and practices investigating how workers’ cognitive processes and their interactions with the environment (e.g., coworkers, managers, and site risk) affect safety behaviors persists. With this background in mind, three broad objectives have been established in this research: (1) to identify the mechanism of social influence on workers’ safety behavior, (2) to characterize how workers’ decision-making processes and the environmental factors interact to affect safety behaviors, (3) to develop research methods to overcome the limitations in previous worker behavior studies. To achieve these research objectives, five interrelated and interdisciplinary studies such as survey analyses, behavioral economic experiments, agent-based modeling and simulation of human behavior, field experiments, and physiological sensor data analysis were conducted. Through these studies it was found that: (1) safety norms shared by managers are significantly stricter than safety norms shared by workers; (2) workers’ safety behaviors are not only influenced by coworkers’ safety behaviors (i.e. , workgroup norm) but also subject to managers’ safety feedback (i.e. , management norms); (3) workers’ social identification with their project intensifies positive influence of management norms and attenuates negative influence on workgroup norms to improve workers’ safety behaviors; (4) project identity is the least salient in construction workers’ self-concept among diverse organizations at construction sites (e.g., workgroup, company, union, trade, project); (5) the effects of different safety management strategies (i.e. , stricter safety feedback, more frequent safety feedback, and stimulation of project identification) on workers’ safety behavior vary based on site risk conditions (low, moderate, high-risk conditions); (6) electrodermal response (EDR) collected from workers’ wristband has a great potential to understand risk perception during their ongoing work. These findings identify the socio-cognitive mechanism of workers’ safety behaviors and provide insight into how to improve workers’ safety behavior and ultimately to reduce accidents in construction by promoting positive social influence regarding safety behaviors.