Abstract
Previous literature has recognized that workers’ unsafe behavior is the combined result of both isolated individual cognitive processes and their interaction with others. Based on the consideration of both individual cognitive factors and social organizational factors, this paper aims to develop an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) approach to explore construction workers’ sociocognitive processes under the interaction with managers, coworkers, and foremen. The developed model is applied to explore the causes of cognitive failure of construction workers and the influence of social groups and social organizational factors on the workers’ unsafe behavior. The results indicate that (1) workers’ unsafe behaviors are gradually reduced with the interaction with managers, foremen, and workers; (2) the foreman is most influential in reducing workers’ unsafe behaviors, and their demonstration role can hardly be ignored; (3) the failure of sociocognitive process of construction workers is affected by many factors, and cognitive process errors could be corrected under social norms; and (4) among various social organizational factors, social identity has the most obvious effect on reducing workers’ unsafe behaviors, and preventive measures are more effective than reactive measures in reducing workers’ unsafe behaviors.
Highlights
Due to the inherent dangers of construction industry, the ever-changing site environment, and the lack of trained construction workers, the accident rate has always been at the forefront [1,2]
This paper proposes an agent-based modeling (ABM) approach to study a complex system of unsafe behavior comprised of cognitive processes, individual cognitive factors, social organizational factors, and social groups, and gives reasonable suggestions to reduce unsafe behavior
This paper mainly studies the influence of social groups and social factors on unsafe behaviors, rather than predicting the occurrence of unsafe behaviors
Summary
Due to the inherent dangers of construction industry, the ever-changing site environment, and the lack of trained construction workers, the accident rate has always been at the forefront [1,2]. In the U.S., 1008 workers were killed on the job in the construction industry in 2018, accounting for 19% of total mortality and was far higher than other industries [3]. In the U.K., the construction industry contributes to 5% of the nation’s employment [4] but accounts for 20.41% of reported fatal injuries [5]. In China, there were 1752 deaths in the construction industry in the first half of 2018 [6]. It can be seen that safety incidents in the construction industry are still frequent and notorious and need to be addressed. Public Health 2020, 17, 1588; doi:10.3390/ijerph17051588 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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