The objective of this paper is to document how workers from different cultures and with different physical characteristics evaluate physical effort in industrial lifting activities. Three hundred and seventy-nine workers in Hong Kong were asked to evaluate the interactive effort of three lifting variables: weight of load, horizontal distance and height of lift. Logistic regression analysis was used to model the effort as a function of the lifting input variables. The input variables were subsequently classified according to the relationship between the input and output variables. The results showed that human personal knowledge and expertise can indeed be used to evaluate the physical effort required for different lifting tasks. Also, there was no difference in the cognitive reasoning pattern in evaluating the physical effort between the Hong Kong workers and the US workers.
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