Virtual Reality as a New Approach for Risk Taking Assessment

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Occupational Safety and Health

Background:

• Risk-taking (RT) behavior in hazardous situations is influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic factors, with broad implications across various disciplines.
• Traditional methods of assessing RT profiles via questionnaires can yield biased results due to their non-realistic, reflexive nature.
• Current assessment methods do not fully capture the reactive, emotional, and impulsive decision-making processes inherent in real-world risky situations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose Virtual Reality (VR) as a next-generation tool for studying risk-taking (RT) processes.
• To leverage VR's capabilities for generating immersive, realistic simulated hazardous environments.
• To explore objective assessment methods with high ecological validity for studying RT behavior.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing high-presence VR environments to trigger real-world reactions, employing the real-world risks approach.
• Implementing embodied interactions to elicit more natural behaviors during simulated hazardous situations.
• Employing stealth assessment for unnoticed real-time evaluations and integrating physiological real-time measurements to avoid subjective bias.

Main Results:

• VR enables the creation of immersive environments that simulate hazardous situations, eliciting more realistic human reactions.
• The integration of four key metric families (real-world risks, embodied interactions, stealth assessment, physiological measurement) offers objective and ecologically valid RT assessment.
• VR facilitates the study of intrinsic and extrinsic factors influencing RT decision-making with reduced bias.

Conclusions:

• Virtual Reality presents a powerful, next-generation tool for the objective and ecologically valid assessment of risk-taking behavior.
• VR's immersive and interactive capabilities overcome the limitations of traditional methods, providing deeper insights into decision-making in hazardous situations.
• Beyond assessment, VR serves as an invaluable training tool for risk-related skills due to its demonstrated transferability to real-world scenarios.