Kenneth R. Laughery

• Rice University

Warnings are safety communications used to inform people about hazards and to provide instructions to avoid or minimize undesirable consequences such as injury or death. Warnings are used in a variety of contexts to address environmental and product-related hazards. In the broad field of safety, particularly injury prevention, there is the concept...

A set of cases concerning child injury is described in which there are several human factors/ergonomics (HFE) issues. Each panelist describes an injury or death of a child with a brief overview of the events that occurred. Major HFE issues are presented and discussed using the framework of the hazard-control hierarchy of designing out, guarding aga...

This special issue of Applied Ergonomics concerns the topic of warnings, safety communications designed to decrease harm to people and property. The field has evolved over time, and with it there has been advancement in knowledge and application. The current special issue contains 14 articles that reflect three distinguishable areas within the warn...

The past 25years have experienced a substantial amount of research on safety communications, more specifically, warnings. This article focuses on the most important factors in designing effective warnings. The warning process is modeled in three stages. Effective warnings attract attention; elicit knowledge, and enable compliance behavior. Two main...

A scenario of an automotive accident caused by tire failure is given followed by a human factors analysis of the information available to consumers on tire aging. Consumers have not been told that the age of the tire is a safety concern. It is not easy to decode the date of manufacture on tires. More publicity and prominent warnngs are needed to co...

A scenario based on actual cases is presented in which a consumer fails to detect a gas leak. A spark source ignites the vapor, causing an explosion and fire. Odorant added to alert people of gas leaks is not always detected for a number of reasons, including nasal congestion, sleep, odor fade, masking, and adaptation or habituation. Electronic gas...

We describe a major factor in research in warnings - namely, forensics. During the past three decades, much of the empirical warnings research has been published in human factors and ergonomics (HF/E) literature. A major impetus to that research has been concurrent activity by HF/E professionals participating as expert witnesses in product liabilit...

This paper has two objectives: to identify and review factors that research has shown to be most significant in determining the effectiveness of warnings; and, to offer suggestions regarding challenges and opportunities for future research on warnings. In order for warnings to be effective, they must accomplish two objectives: they must be noticed...

Since the early 1980s there has been an increased interest in research on warnings. This chapter has several objectives. First, we describe the purpose of warnings and where warnings fit with other safety considerations, such as design and guarding. Next, we present a model that incorporates both communication and information-processing concepts, w...

Many Americans have turned to dietary supplements for help in losing weight despite the significant health risks associated with their use. This study examines what people know and believe about dietary supplements. Results showed that participants were generally knowledgeable about dietary supplements, including their purpose, where they are sold,...

Three experiments were conducted in order to examine the effects of defendant wealth on civil litigation damage award decisions. Wealth was manipulated in each experiment by presenting participants with either high or low company profit information for that year. All participants read three trial scenarios in which the defendant Manufacturer was fo...

This paper reports the results of a research project to study the nature and structure of phone messages and the design characteristics of phone messaging systems that would optimize the retrieval of relevant message information. Of particular concern with respect to the structure of a phone message was the location of a phone number left in the me...

This research focuses on the self-reported use of owner's manuals for automotive vehicles. The results indicate that owner's manuals are frequently not read. Nevertheless, people prefer owner's manuals to electronic presentations of the same product information. Implications for facilitating reader use of product documentation are discussed.

A study was carried out using four measures of effectiveness to compare product warnings that are consistent with the American National Standards Institute Product Safety Signs and Labels standard (ANSI 2535.4) to warnings that are not consistent with the standard. Inconsistent warnings were based on the format of existing product warnings. Two war...

A study addressing jury decisions regarding punitive damages awards in civil litigation was carried out. Two issues explored were the fkct that jurors typically do not have a good metric for assigning a value to such damages and the concept of "leakage." The latter concept refers to decisions regardii compensatory damages and punitive damages influ...

A study was carried out to explore the effects of two variables on the amount of pain and suffering awards in a product liability litigation context. The first variable was the level of liability/responsibility allocated to the plaintiff and defendant for the accident and injury. The two levels were 100% and 60% assigned to the defendant, with the...

Four experiments explored the effects of warnings on people's allocation of responsibility for product safety. Participants read descriptions of accident scenarios in which injuries occurred during the use of products. They then allocated responsibility to the manufacturer, retailer, or consumer (user). Results of two experiments indicated more res...

The purpose of this experiment was to examine the effects of warning quality and human factors expert testimony on decision making in consumer product injury cases. Participants read summaries of consumer product accidents, where a no, poor or good warning was present. In two conditions, human factors (HP) expert testimony was included, giving an o...

People may make assumptions about the hazard levels of products based on the physical characteristics of the container. One primary physical characteristic of a container is its shape (configuration). For example a container appearing similar to a carton of milk might be assumed to hold a less hazardous substance than would a paint can. The present...

A study explored how injury severity and the presence of warnings influence people's allocation of responsibility for safety during consumer product use. Eighty-eight subjects were shown ten scenarios, one for each of ten products, describing an accident and injury. The subjects assigned responsibility to the manufacturer, the retailer and the cons...

This study examined the effect of load weight, and physical work capacity (PWC) on psychophysical lift ratings of 33 men and 58 women. Each subject lifted seven boxes that ranged in weight from 6.8 kg to 40.9 kg and rated each lift with Borg's CR-10 scale. The lift components were a vertical distance of the hands to the floor of 53 cm, and a vertic...

A study was carried out exploring how people allocate responsibility for the safe use of products in the work environment. Products typically used in different work environments were named and subjects apponioned safety responsibility to the manufacturer of the product, the distributorlretailer, the employer, and the employee using the product. The...

Standards, guidelines, and research findings suggest that safety signs should generally contain four components: signal word, hazard, consequence and instruction statements. The purpose of this research is to determine the relative importance of different safety sign components. Two experiments examined this issue by having subjects construct a set...

Two experiments employed surveys to address seat belt experience and use as well as perceptions of risk associated with various seat belt configurations. In Experiment 1. a questionnaire was administered to two samples: 104 srudents at the Universiryof Houston and 162 volunteers at a shopping mall in Raleigh,North Carolina. Of primary interest was...

Four experiments were carried out to assess effects of product warning explicitness on purchase preferences and caution in use. Explicitness was defined as the specificity or detail with which potential injury consequences were described. All experiments employed a paradigm in which warnings varying in explicitness were described for familiar produ...

Organizing theoretical framework: a consolidated communication-human information processing (C-HIP) Model -- Intermediate processing stages: methodological considerations for research on warnings -- Methodological techniques for evaluating behavioral intentions and compliance -- Source -- Channel -- Attention capture and maintenance -- Comprehensio...

A public health warning is currently required for all alcoholic beverage containers in the United States. One factor in the effectiveness of this warning is its noticeability—the characteristics that influence whether or not it is likely to be seen. Three experiments addressed this aspect of the warning. Experiment 1 examined warning design factors...

As many as 350 serious spinal cord injuries occur in the United States every year as a result of diving into swimming pools. While there is substantial data on the demographics of injured divers and the events surrounding their injuries, there has been little analysis of the human factors issues associated with this type of accident. Data from 12 s...

Cracking, opening, and closing valves are physically demanding tasks required of chemical plant process operators. This study determined if isometric strength tests predicted the capacity to: 1) crack valves; and 2) fully open or close them. The study involved three interrelated steps: 1) compete task analyses to define the torque required to crack...

A great deal of research exists regarding the likelihood that warning information will be noticed, but much less research has examined the conditions under which warnings are likely to be read. One variable that may influence the ability and willingness of people to read text is legibility. Poor legibility may result in the information being more d...

Eye tracking procedures were employed to study eye scan patterns of subjects searching for warning messages in product labels. Thirty-eight alcoholic beverage labels were constructed, 24 of which contained a warning. For each label, subjects indicated whether or not it contained a warning. Salience of the warning was manipulated by the presence or...

An experiment was conducted to assess the effect of various existing warning design factors on the noticeability of warnings on alcoholic beverage containers. One-hundred containers, 50 with warnings and 50 without, were used as stimuli and the time required to determine whether or not a warning was present was recorded. The results indicate that w...

Manufacturers typically provide consumers with a warning message on the label of potentially hazardous products in order to encourage their safe use. Warnings often vary in explicitness and severity, where explicitness refers to the specificity of the stated injury consequences and severity refers to the harshness of the consequences. This study ex...

Three studies examined factors associated with people's hazard perceptions of consumer products. A specific interest was how these perceptions relate to willingness to read product warnings. In Study 1, 72 generically-named products were rated on perceived hazard, familiarity, and several expectations associated with warnings, including willingness...

Facial recognition performance was examined as a function of changes in the target between initial exposure (study) and a subsequent recognition test. Photographic mode (colour vs. black and white) was changed in Experiments 1 and 2 and pose (front vs. profile) was changed in Experiment 2. The predictions of three information quantity models and of...

The purpose of the present work was to identify some of the factors that influence effectiveness of warnings. Two laboratory experiments designed to examine behavioral effectiveness indicated that a warning placed before procedural instructions is more likely to lead to compliance than a warning that follows instructions. Two rating experiments ind...

Expert witnesses in the domain of warnings draw heavily on the research literature as a scientific basis for analyses and opinions. This requirement for a scientific basis has in turn resulted in the identification of gaps in the empirical literature and led to research addressing important warnings issues. The warnings research and forensic invest...