Behavioral Compliance to In-Manual and On-Product Warnings

Abstract

Warnings have several purposes, including the communication of hazard information and promotion of safe behavior. The present study examined how compliance is affected by viewing duration of product manual warnings and the presence and content of on-product warnings for a computer memory installation task involving an electrostatic discharge hazard. Analyses showed that both the presence of an ANSI-style label and longer manual exposure increased behavioral compliance. The additive effect of exposure time and label presence and content suggest that both previous exposure to warning information and effective on-product warning design benefit compliance.

Reconsidering the Role of Design Standards in Developing Effective Safety Labeling: Monolithic Recipes or Collections of Separable Features?

“…Warning features. Although prior research has described warning labels as being either consistent ("ANSI-style") or inconsistent with ANSI guidelines (Frantz et al, 2005;Shaver et al, 2006;Smith & Wogalter, 2010), the ANSI (2011) guidelines are composed of a collection of separable features. In order to analyze the relationships between these features and predicted noticing/compliance, we created binary variables for font size (0 = 17 point, 1 = 20 point), paragraph format (0 = continuous font, 1 = bulleted font), warning header (0 = orange header not present, 1 = orange header present), presence of a pictogram (0 = not present, 1 = present), and the presence of an alternative (modified image or ANSI-ISO blend) pictogram style (0 = not present, 1 = present).…”

“…Overall, research investigating the impact of safety labeling configuration on measures of warning effectiveness has produced somewhat conflicting findings. Some previous studies have reported that warning labels that are consistent with the ANSI Z535 guidelines are more effective than alternative warnings in terms of both predicted compliance (Laughery et al, 2002) and actual behavioral compliance (Smith & Wogalter, 2010). Other studies, however, have reported that the effectiveness of warning labels is contingent upon perceived risk (Heckman, Harley, Scher, & Young, 2010) and that ANSI-style warning labels can be less effective than both older OSHA-style warning labels (Kim & Wogalter, 2009) and more generic non-ANSI style warnings (Frantz, Young, Rhoades, & Wisniewski, 2005;Young, Frantz, Rhoades, & Darnell, 2002).…”

Evaluating ANSI Z535-Formatted Warning Labels as an Integrative System

“…Laughery et al (2002) reported that warning labels that comply with ANSI Z535 guidelines are perceived as more likely to be noticed, read, understood and complied with as compared to non-compliant warnings. An experiment conducted by Smith and Wogalter (2010) provides support for the hypothesis that users are more likely to comply with on-product warning labels that are consistent with ANSI Z535 guidelines than generic warning labels. Conversely, other research suggests that both generic and ANSI-style warning labels are ineffective at inducing compliance in situations where perceived risk is low (Heckman, Harley, Scher, & Young, 2010), and that in some situations older OSHA-style warnings may be more effective than warnings that comport with more recent versions of the Z535 guidelines (Kim & Wogalter, 2009).…”