Social Influence on Construction Safety Behaviors: A Multi-User Virtual Reality Experiment

The construction industry is a high-risk industry in terms of job site safety. Construction workers’ unsafe behaviors has been criticized as a key driving factor of construction safety incidents. A variety of studies indicate that social influence greatly affects workers’ safety behaviors. However, the social influence on workers’ safety behaviors in hazardous situations has not been well explored, partially due to the difficulty of simulating hazardous situations in the real world. To overcome this limitation, this research utilized a multi-user virtual reality (MVR) system with motion tracking function to simulate hazardous scenarios to study how social influence affects construction workers’ safety behaviors. A hazardous virtual environment with a plank between two high-rise buildings was created to simulate the high-rise walking scenarios of iron workers in construction projects. A human-subject experiment (n = 126) was conducted to investigate the role of social influence in a simulated scenario involving walking across a narrow plank between two virtual high-rise buildings. The participants walked through the plank in the virtual environment while observing different scenarios, such as seeing a person slowly walking across the plank or falling from the plank. Participants’ behaviors, such as the time taken to walk across the plank, were recorded and analyzed to understand effects of social influence. The results of the experiment indicate that social influence played an important role in safety behaviors in the virtual hazardous situation. In addition, the developed MVR system is able to serve similar experiment in the future.