Exploring the Effect of Timely Reminder on Maritime Unsafe Acts

Abstract

Unsafe acts are a primary cause of maritime accidents, but timely reminders can evaluate improper behavior and provide alerts to prompt correction. This paper investigates whether timely reminders can discourage unsafe acts. First, data in relation to participants’ unsafe acts according to different psychological frames were collected on the basis of an experiment conducted on a navigation simulator. The effects of timely reminders on unsafe acts were then analyzed through the independent-samples Kruskal–Wallis test and regression analysis. The results demonstrate that the introduction of timely reminders could significantly reduce the number of unsafe acts committed by crew members during voyages. Moreover, the framing effect influenced the intervention results; under less stressful conditions, a timely reminder with the gain frame more effectively discourages unsafe acts than does a reminder with the loss frame. By contrast, under more stressful conditions, the loss frame exhibits advantages over the gain frame with respect to sending timely reminders to reduce the occurrence of unsafe acts. Compared with novices, experienced seafarers are less sensitive to the effects of timely reminders in the process of ship operation, whether with the gain frame or loss frame. After the three major challenges of functional subdivision, situational complexity, and mechanism robustness are discussed, two suggestions are proposed: an integrated system for automatically detecting unsafe acts that sends out corresponding timely reminders and an onboard organizational management mechanism.