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HAZARD RECOGNITION IS A VITAL SKILL required for nearly every safety activity. For example, it is required to successfully complete prejob safety briefings, safety observations and even prevention through design reviews. Although the profession has made tremendous progress in safety management over the past 50 years, most safety practices are built on the implicit assumption that workers can see hazards that are present and anticipate those that may emerge. However, recent research suggests that hazard recognition skills may not be as strong as originally assumed (Albert, Hallowell, Skaggs et al., 2017).
As organizations have improved their incident learning, hazard recognition has emerged as a root cause in about half of all incidents (Alexander et al., 2017; Haslam et al., 2005). Because hazards can be so obvious in retrospect, many historical incident investigations ended with the conclusion that the workers were complacent or negligent (i.e., they saw the hazard but worked unsafely around it anyway). However, when we consider the context from the worker's perspective in the moment before an incident occurred, science suggests that some hazards are overlooked because of blind spots that affect us all (Hu et al., 2018). In other words, what we once thought of as complacency may actually be a predictable biological limitation.
Most scientific understanding of hazard recognition lies in the branch of applied psychology known as situational awareness. Situational awareness is the process of perceiving an portant understanding its meaning and anticipating outcomes (Endsley, 1995). Translated to the context of safety, this process involves 1. recognizing the presence of a danger (i.e., hazard recognition); 2. judging the level of danger posed by the hazard (i.e., risk perception); and 3. deciding how to behave around the hazard (i.e., risk tolerance). This model of situational awareness is presented in Figure 1.
Interestingly, the academic community has created a wealth of understanding about risk perception, risk tolerance and safety behavior, but, until recently, comparatively little was known about how a person identifies a hazard in the first place. This is critical knowledge because risk perception, risk tolerance and behavior are irrelevant if the associated hazard is not identified.
Fortunately, hazard recognition research has accelerated in the past decade. Field experiments have uncovered the types of hazards that people commonly miss, and laboratory...