Glossary · 6 · Warnings and risk communication
Hazard perception
Also known as: Hazard recognition, Hazard anticipation
German: Gefahrenwahrnehmung
In human factors and safety research, hazard perception is a person's ability to detect hazards in a situation and to anticipate how a potentially dangerous situation will develop, early enough to act; in road safety it is measured with computer-based hazard perception tests.
- Applied cognitive psychology
- Warnings and risk communication
In one sentence
Hazard perception is the ability to detect hazards in a situation and anticipate how danger develops early enough to act, e.g. in driving or at work.
Example
New operators of a robot cell do not notice that a part has stuck on the infeed and that a colleague is about to reach in. The training adds short video scenes of developing hazards at the cell, and the instructions name the cues to look for.
Rests on
- Situation awareness: perceiving the elements of a situation, understanding them and projecting their development; hazard perception is its safety-related part.
- Selective attention and Inattentional blindness: hazards outside the current focus are easily missed.
- Signal detection theory: detecting a developing hazard among many harmless events.
How it applies
- Road safety: Horswill (2016) reviews hazard perception tests, their association with crash risk and the finding that the skill takes long driving experience to develop; the UK driving theory test includes a hazard perception part with video clips of developing hazards.
- Workplace and machinery: A hazard becomes a hazardous situation when a person is exposed to it. Documentation and training can name the cues of developing hazards (sounds, positions, states of the machine) so that users recognize them.
- Warnings: Readers who do not perceive a hazard do not see why a warning concerns them; describing the hazardous situation concretely supports the comprehension and beliefs stages of the C-HIP model.
Hazard perception vs. risk perception vs. hazard identification
Hazard perception is detecting and anticipating hazards in the situation at hand. Risk perception is the subjective judgment of how likely and severe harm is. Hazard identification is the systematic step of the manufacturer's risk assessment, not a perceptual ability of users.
Limits
- Most evidence comes from driving; transfer to industrial tasks is plausible but less studied.
- Users' hazard perception is never a protective measure the design can rely on; documentation supports it, but risk reduction follows the risk assessment.