Study On The Influence Mechanism Of Demographic Factors On Construction Workers’ Representativeness Heuristic

Construction safety has made great improvements in the past few decades.Nevertheless,the construction industry still faces tremendous safety challenges,and the human factors(e.g.,unsafe acts)have been found to be the most salient causes of on-site accidents.The cognitive psychology suggests that the explicit behavior is dominated by the implicit brain.Therefore,psychological factors have been proved to be the determinants of construction workers’ behaviors.Representativeness heuristic(RH),a kind of “short-cut” or “rule of thumb”,is used to simplify the information processing and save cognitive resources,while triggers systematic biases potentially in some cases.It has been proved that RH is an important cause of unsafe behavior.However,due to the differences in physiological structure and life experience between decision makers,they will react differently to the same stimulus.Further explore the construction workers’ dependence on RH in cognitive processing,explores the influencing characteristics and causes of demographic factors on construction workers’ RH,and takes measures to reduce the frequency of construction workers’ using RH to make decisions,which is of great significance to improve the intervention effect of construction workers’ unsafe behavior.This research makes a systematic exploratory research on the representative heuristic of construction workers.Firstly,based on the analysis of safety behavior theory and RH,a RH questionnaire is developed in accordance with the characteristics of construction workers,which makes up for the defects of the current RH questionnaire design.Secondly,the results of RH in behavioral decision making and the influence of demographic factors on RH are sorted out through literature,and relevant hypotheses are proposed.Questionnaires were distributed to front-line construction workers in Chongqing,Sichuan and other places,and various data analysis methods such as text analysis,descriptive statistical analysis,correlation analysis and ANOVA analysis were used to explore the dependence of construction workers’ cognitive processing process on RH,and sort out the influence characteristics and causes of demographic factors on construction workers’ RH.The results show that the cognitive process of construction workers generally depends on RH.In addition,the ANOVA analysis of the influence of demographic factors on the RH found that there was a significant correlation between age,education and the RH level of construction workers,but there was no significant difference in RH level among construction workers with different seniority and types of work.The relationship between the age and education level and RH shows a U-shaped trend,that is,with the increase of age and education level,the RH level of construction workers first decreases and then gradually increases.According to the above results,this research complements and improves the influence path from demographic characteristics to RH to unsafe behavior of construction workers.In addition,this research found that construction safety managers should pay more attention to vulnerable groups of workers,such as young construction workers and elderly construction workers or workers with low education,in order to minimize the dependence of construction workers’ cognitive process on RH,and practical suggestions for specific intervention measures for specific groups of construction workers were put forward.