Cognitive mechanism of construction workers’ unsafe behavior: A systematic review

Construction workers’ unsafe behavior is one of the most frequent and direct causes of site accidents, thus a good understanding of its associated mechanisms is essential for the development of targeted interventions. Among all, the cognitive mechanism of construction workers’ unsafe behavior (CM-CWUB) is key to understanding reasons underlying unsafe behavior. However, an overview of research on CM-CWUB is still lacking. This study aims to address this gap by systematically reviewing the CM-CWUB literature. A thorough literature search was conducted via the databases of Web of Science, Scopus and ScienceDirect, resulting in 53 eligible articles included in the final review. Through content analysis, the specific types of construction workers’ cognitive failures, interactions among workers’ cognitive failures, relationships between workers’ cognitive failures and unsafe behavior, and measurements of workers’ cognitive failures were identified. Further in-depth analysis revealed that current studies on CM-CWUB have deficiencies in the terminologies of cognitive failures, the interactions among cognitive failures, influencing mechanisms of cognitive failures on unsafe behavior, measurements and monitoring of cognitive failures, and empirical examination on interactions among cognitive failures and relationships between cognitive failures and unsafe behavior. Future research is suggested to put efforts into these aspects. In addition, an integrated conceptual framework for CM-CWUB was developed to illustrate how multiple types of cognitive failures interact to induce unsafe behavior. By providing the current status, gaps, and future agenda of CM-CWUB research, this study contributes to the improvement of both theory and practice.