The Effects of Familiarity and Risk Perception on Workplace Warning Compliance

Abstract

Consumer products cause millions of injuries every year at a total cost of billions of dollars in medical costs, lost wages and reductions in quality of life. To prevent injuries, manufacturers often place warnings on dangerous products and materials with information about proper handling and possible injuries. In order for a warning to be effective, it must be seen, read, comprehended, and followed. A breakdown iu any of these stages will hinder the warning from preventing an injury. This study is a naturalistic investigation of warning compliance behavior. It evaluates the effects of a user's perceptions ofthe product risk and his/her familiarity with the product and brand on the nature of his/her hehavior. Products were pretested to determine the familiarity and perceived risk of the products with the general user population. This data was verified with the participants in the data collection phase of the study to insure the validity of the results. Participants' familiarity with the product and their perceptions of the product's inherent risk had a significant effect on the number of safe behaviors from the warning with which they complied. Users complied with more safe behaviors when using products that were perceived as risky compared to other products of the same class that were perceived as less risky. Similarly, users complied with more safe behaviors when using brands with which they were more familiar compared to those of the same product class with which they were less familiar.

Cleaning Products, Environmental Awareness and Risk Perception in Mérida, Mexico

“…RP studies have analyzed popular knowledge, attitudes and behaviors related to water reuse [35], pesticides [36], loss of agro-biodiversity [37] and West Nile virus [38]. When the object of the RP study is a product, RP refers to how much that people feel that their safety is threatened by using it [39]. To our knowledge there are no published studies relating cleaning products, RP and EA in the developing world in general and Mexico in particular, and cleaning products contamination studies are scarce.…”

Characteristics of warning labels for drug containers and their effects on perceived hazardousness

“…We propose that familiarity with common warning stimuli accounts for this result; for example, a triangular frame is often used on traffic signs to represent a warning or a hazardous situation, whereas an octagonal frame is not used to communicate danger in this context. Such familiarity with warning stimuli may be achieved through participants' direct experience as well as through observations of use, exposure to warnings, or experience with similar products (Ortiz et al, 2000;Riley, 2014). Consequently, in the present experiment, the heightened perception of hazardousness was greater for the familiar triangle than that for the less familiar octagon.…”

Korean Consumers’ Recognition of Risks Depending on the Provision of Safety Information for Chemical Products

“…In particular, the more familiar the terms are, the lower the perceived risk. The more familiar the terms used for products, the lower the risk perceived by consumers [26,27]. Fischer and Frewer [53] conducted a study on risk perception for foods and found that the higher the familiarity with food hazards, the lower the measure of hazard perception.…”