Attentional bias toward safety predicts safety behaviors

• Published in: Accident analysis and prevention Vol. 71; pp. 144 - 153
• Main Authors: Xu, Yaoshan, Li, Yongjuan, Wang, Guangxi, Yuan, Xiao, Ding, Weidong, Shen, Zhongxiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.10.2014; Elsevier
• Subjects: ABS; Accident analysis; Adult; Allocations; Attention; Attentional bias; Automation; Behavior; Bias; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition; Humans; Implicit cognition; Male; Medical sciences; Miscellaneous; Motivation; Nuclear Power Plants; Organizational Culture; Prevention and actions; Public health. Hygiene; Public health. Hygiene-occupational medicine; Safety; Safety behavior; Safety climate; Safety motivation; Stroop Test; Tasks; Visual; Attentional bias; Implicit cognition; Safety climate; Safety behavior; Safety motivation; Prediction; Cognition; Social climate; Safety culture; Motivation; Behavior; Safety; Predictive factor
• ISSN: 0001-4575; 1879-2057
• DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2014.05.013

•Effect of attentional bias to safety (ABS) on safety behaviors was explored.•ABS reflects employees’ implicit concern regarding safety.•Employees with better safety behavior showed significant ABS.•ABS positively predicted safety behaviors, safety climate and safety motivation.•Perceived safety climate and safety motivation mediate the effect of ABS. Safety studies have primarily focused on how explicit processes and measures affect safety behavior and subsequent accidents and injuries. Recently, safety researchers have paid greater attention to the role of implicit processes. Our research focuses on the role of attentional bias toward safety (ABS) in workplace safety. ABS is a basic, early-stage cognitive process involving the automatic and selective allocation of attentional resources toward safety cues, which reflect the implicit motivational state of employees regarding safety goal. In this study, we used two reaction time-based paradigms to measure the ABS of employees in three studies: two modified Stroop tasks (Studies 1 and 2) and a visual dot-probe task (Study 3). Results revealed that employees with better safety behavior showed significant ABS (Study 2), and greater ABS than employees with poorer safety behavior (Studies 1 and 2). Moreover, ABS was positively associated with the perceived safety climate and safety motivation of employees, both of which mediate the effect of ABS on safety behavior (Study 3). These results contributed to a deeper understanding of how early-stage automatic perceptual processing affects safety behavior. The practical implications of these results were also discussed.