Abstract:

Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) practices generate an annual global cost of approximately 2680 billion euros, and although OSH training has shown favourable results, its effectiveness is below expectations. Risk taking (RT) assessment constitutes an interesting challenge for both, occupational safety and organizational researchers and psychologists. From a psychological perspective, RT is a complex construct that encompasses a variety of factors related to decision-making process in uncertainty situations, such as decision features, situational factors and individual differences. Decision features and situational factors have been investigated in several fields, including education and learning. Contrarily, individual differences, specifically related to locus of control, emotional regulation, personality traits, as well as sensation seeking, impulsivity and executive control in RT, have been less addressed. Traditional methods to assess RT factors refer to self-reports scales and/or behavioural tasks, such as the BART, that are showing limitations in terms of real-life situations and responses. Furthermore, each scale or task is able to measure one factor and dimension related to RT. Therefore, a unique system for RT measurement that comprises this complexity is needed. Virtual reality (VR) has been arisen as a useful tool for RT assessment, since it provides high ecological validity to the measures, rendering embodied interactions and allowing the application of stealth assessment techniques. Individual differences may influence humans’ behaviour when interacting with a VR serious game. In the present paper, we analyse the influence of age, gender and technological expertise of the subjects on RT assessment by the application of a VR serious game (a labyrinth). 111 healthy subjects participated in the study, completing a battery of standardized measures of risk-related constructs and a self-designed VR serious game (eye tracking and galvanic skin response measures included). The influence of individual differences on the VR serious game analysed in the present study can be interpreted as follows: younger participants and participants with high technological expertise solved the tasks in less time, and performed a better optimization of the resources. Additionally, males showed riskier behaviours, while females did a better use of the resources. In contrast, variables related to chosen paths and reward collection remained stable across different ages, genders and technological expertise. These results suggest that individual differences have an important role in the design of VR serious games for RT assessment. Through an adequate and unbiased evaluation of RT, it will be possible to create personalized training programs to fit users´ individual characteristics, contributing to the improvement of OSH training programs.

Keywords:

Serious game, risk taking, age, gender, ecological validity.