Hazard awareness and risk perception.

This chapter discusses hazard awareness and risk perception. The study of risk perception and hazard awareness as factors in accident causality has been far from systematics. The theory of risk homeostasis states that people adjust their behavior to changing circumstances to keep the objective risk essentially constant. Although risk homeostasis has the merit of applicability to everyday experience and some experimental support, it has proved to be extremely controversial. The reason for this is that any attempt to improve safety by engineering will fail, no matter what changes are made. The theory predicts that people will simply change their behavior to return to the level of risk that prevailed before the improvement was introduced. This becomes more evident on the examination of recent accident trends that emphasize factors such as lack of due care and attention, failure to use safe working methods, and human failings. The measurement of risk perception in safety training could be of considerable value as an indicator of comprehension of the course if suitably refined to include objective baselines, such as the actual frequency of accidents.