Changing User's Safety Locus of Control through Persuasive Play: An Application to Aviation Safety

Virtual risk experiences have been proposed in persuasive technology as an approach to change people’s attitudes and behaviors concerning safety topics. This paper advances the investigation of virtual risk experiences in different directions. First, we extend the study of their effects to safety locus of control, which is an important predictor of an individual’s attitudes and behaviors with respect to risky situations. Second, we explore a design that relies much more on play than previous virtual experiences of risks in the literature. Third, we extend the investigation of persuasive technology to a topic in aviation safety (i.e., assuming a proper brace position during an emergency landing) that has never been approached before with an interactive system and we analyze if a novel game-based approach can be effective in fostering awareness of this fundamental safety action. Our study shows that the proposed persuasive game produces noteworthy results in terms of learning safety knowledge and improves players’ attitudes towards aircraft accidents, increasing their internal safety locus of control and decreasing the external one.