Social norms and their impact on safety-related rule violations in process control: Does it make a difference if operators are aware that residents will be injured?

As the avoidance of safety-related rule violations is an important concern in high reliability organizations, it is essential to understand the decision-making process that determines rule violating behavior. As a theoretical background, the Integrated Model of Behavior Prediction (IM) is used to design two studies in which the impact of different “goods at stake” (injured residents versus damaged plant) on safety-related rule violations was investigated. An online prestudy was conducted to select two appropriate scenarios out of three with which the “goods at stake” were operationalized followed by an experiment to determine the effect of the “goods at stake” on safety-related rule violations. “Goods at stake” were operationalized in terms of a) a damaged plant versus b) 20 injured residents as a consequence of a deflagration caused by a safety-related rule violation. Although the prestudy showed that subjects are less likely to violate a safety-related rule in the case of injured residents, this result was not replicated by the main experiment. Safety-related rule violations were equally likely in the case of residents injured and plant damage. Post hoc analyses showed that person-related variables also addressed by the IM were significantly related to the decision of a violation, such as skills and abilities.