Latent Effect of Safety Interventions

While researchers have dispensed considerable effort in the past decades to reduce the risk of occupational injuries in the construction industry, the large amount of safety incidents occurring each year indicate that many of the safety interventions and technological advances have not fully achieved their safety goals. This fact suggests the possibility of a latent side effect of safety interventions, known as risk compensation. Since no study has empirically examined the risk-taking behaviors of workers as a function of the number and type of safety interventions in place for their protection, this research examined whether the concept of risk compensation could offset some safety benefits of protection equipment. An immersive mixed-reality environment (i.e., virtual reality and passive haptics) was developed to simulate a roofing activity. Then, combining real-time head- and ankle-tracking sensors with qualitative sources of data, the authors monitored the reactionary behavioral responses of participants while they completed roofing tasks under three, randomly ordered levels of safety protection in the mixed-reality roofing simulation. The results indicated that providing more safety interventions (i.e., higher levels of fall protection) produced a sense of invulnerability among participants. This false sense of security ultimately increased their risk-taking behavior by up to 55%: participants stepped closer to the roof edge, leaned over the edge, and spent more time exposing themselves to fall risk. Although this study used students as unskilled roofing workers, it provides an initial empirical understanding of how more safety protections might implicitly signal workers to take additional risks—an effect of risk compensation. These findings could significantly influence how the construction industry approaches the development and implementation of safety interventions to offset the influence of risk compensation.