Antecedents of construction workers' safety cognition: A systematic review

The issue of construction workers’ unsafe behavior has been a global challenge. Behavior is a product of human cognition, and research from a cognitive perspective can potentially curb unsafe behavior at its source. Hence, safety cognition research is proliferating quickly. Many studies have explored the antecedents of safety cognition, but most focused on just a few antecedents or stages of safety cognition. No research provides a comprehensive compilation and review of the antecedents of safety cognition. Thus, to fill this research gap, this paper aims to 1) systematically summarize the current state of research on the antecedents of construction workers' safety cognition and 2) provide directions for future research. To achieve these aims, we collected 198 papers and proposed the antecedents model of construction workers’ safety cognition, which consists of four levels: social factors, organizational factors, work situational factors, and individual factors. Then, content analysis was used to extract antecedents, relationships among antecedents, and relationships between antecedents and safety cognition. Finally, some suggestions for future research were presented based on the in-depth discussion, including 1) exploring antecedents of safety cognition from a holistic perspective 2) exploring the causal antecedents of safety cognition and 3) exploring the mechanism of safety cognitive failure. This systematic review not only improves the theoretical understanding of antecedents of construction workers' safety cognition but also provides practical guidance to safety managers on how to rectify workers' biased safety cognition to reduce unsafe behaviors.