An Empirically Based Agent-Based Model of the Sociocognitive Process of Construction Workers’ Safety Behavior

Abstract

Workers’ unsafe behaviors have a substantial impact on construction safety. To regulate workers’ unsafe behavior, construction practitioners have mainly used formal controls (e.g., penalties). However, the formal approaches may not be effective at eliciting desired behavioral changes in improving safety behavior. Therefore, recently, researchers have paid more attention to how unsafe behaviors are produced. In this regard, cognitive models of safety behavior and empirical evidence on social influence have been suggested. However, there is a noticeable paucity of research investigating the mechanism behind the link between cognitive process, social influence, site risk, and safety behavior. In this paper, an empirically based agent-based model that incorporates theoretical and empirical findings of the sociocognitive process of workers’ safety behaviors is developed. The model is used to conduct experiments examining how the sociocognitive process interacts with safety management interventions (i.e., strictness and frequency of management feedback, and project identification) and influences workers’ safety behaviors across different site risk conditions (i.e., low-, modest-, and high-risk conditions). The results demonstrated that all three interventions contribute to decreasing the incident rate. Also, the interaction effects of the interventions in different site risk conditions were found using the parameter sweeping. The results indicated that (1) promoting workers’ project identification would be an effective strategy in the modest-risk site condition; (2) other interventions should be combined after achieving the medium strictness of management feedback in the high-risk site condition; and (3) other interventions would not be effective without very strict management feedback in the low-risk site condition. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge on construction safety by extending the authors’ understanding of the role of sociocognitive process and its interaction with the environment in shaping workers’ safety behaviors. Additionally, the experiment results are expected to lay a strong foundation for developing effective safety management interventions in the construction projects.