Curbing Construction Workers’ Risk Habituation to Workplace Hazards: Observing Habituated Behaviors and Providing Interventions in a Virtual Reality Environment

Abstract

In high-risk work environments, workers become habituated to hazards they frequently encounter, subsequently underestimating risk and engaging in unsafe behaviors. This phenomenon, termed “risk habituation,” has been identified as a significant root cause of fatalities and injuries at workplaces. Providing an effective intervention that curbs workers’ risk habituation is critical in preventing occupational injuries and fatalities. Risk habituation is a form of learning. Therefore, the inattentiveness to hazards resulting from habituation can be reduced by implementing an effective behavioral intervention. In particular, providing time-sensitive feedback once habituation is observed and measuring the effectiveness of interventions are both critical steps in the implementation of an effective behavioral intervention. However, to date, due to the absence of a method to measure workers’ habituation to workplace hazards in a construction context, there have been no controlled studies that directly investigate construction workers’ risk habituation. Consequently, current safety training is questionably effective in curbing workers’ risk habituation. With the advance of virtual reality (VR) technologies, previous studies in construction safety have incorporated VR to enhance workers’ safety knowledge and safety skills. However, VR’s use as a behavior intervention tool for risk habituation has not been fully explored, and many questions remain regarding how behavioral consequences of habituation can be measured in a VR environment, and how construction workers’ habituation to workplace hazards can be curbed using VR-based behavioral intervention. To address these issues, this study aims to determine how to observe the development of workers’ risk habituation and provide effective interventions using VR. To achieve this goal, four interrelated and interdisciplinary studies were performed. The efficacy of a VR environment in observing and curbing workers’ risk habituation has been examined at both the behavioral and sensory levels. The findings of this study are expected to provide a better understanding of workers’ risk habituation, thereby contributing to the reduction of injuries and fatalities in the construction industry.