How Sensation-Seeking Propensity Determines Individuals’ Risk-Taking Behaviors: Implication of Risk Compensation in a Simulated Roofing Task

Abstract

Risk compensation theory attempts to explain why and how workers modify their risk-taking behaviors in response to the level of safety intervention they receive. One ramification of this theory is that dispositional factors—such as sensation-seeking propensity—may contribute to the likelihood and nature of behavioral adaptations to safety interventions. Accordingly, this paper discusses a mixed-reality roofing simulation that explored sensation-seeking propensity as a determinant of individuals’ risk-taking behavior. Three increasing levels of safety interventions (i.e., no intervention, injury-reducing intervention, and injury-preventing intervention) served as the experimental manipulations. Participant’s motions, risk-taking behaviors, and risk perceptions were monitored using real-time location-tracking sensors and semistructured interviews. Collectively, the results demonstrated that risk propensity (in terms of sensation-seeking disposition) moderated the relationship between providing safety interventions and risk-taking behaviors. While participants in this study took significantly more risks when protected with a safety intervention—thereby demonstrating risk compensation due to a greater decline in perceived level of risk—those with a high sensation-seeking propensity especially adapted their behaviors to offset safety gains intended by interventions. Thus, individuals scoring high in sensation-seeking appear to form a unique high-risk propensity group of subjects. While students acting as unskilled roofing workers were recruited for this study, the findings provided an initial empirical understanding of how more safety protections might implicitly signal subjects with high-risk propensity to take additional risks and behave in riskier fashion without perceiving their behavior to be risky. This paper reveals the need to provide participants scoring high in sensation-seeking with injury-prevention interventions to counteract their excessive risk-taking and risk compensation behavior.