Virtual reality enhances safety training in the maritime industry: An organizational training experiment with a non‐WEIRD sample

Objective:Many industries struggle with training dynamic risk assessment, and howto bridge the gap between safety training and behavior in real life scenarios. In thisarticle, we focus on dynamic risk assessment during a mooring operation and investi-gate the potential value of using immersive virtual reality (VR) simulations comparedto standard training procedures in an international maritime training organization.Methods:In a pilot study, we compared two ways of implementing a VR simulation(stand-alone or with post-simulation reflection) to a manual and a personal trainercondition in a between-subjects design with 86 students in a maritime school. Basedon the results we compared the stand-alone VR simulation to the personal trainercondition in a between-subjects design in a non-Western, Educated, Industrialized,Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) sample of 28 seafarers from the Kiribati Islands at aninternational maritime training organization.Results:The VR simulation group reported significantly higher perceived enjoyment(d = 1.28), intrinsic motivation (d = 0.96), perceived learning (d = 0.90), and behavioralchange (d = 0.88), and significantly lower extraneous cognitive load (d = 0.82) com-pared to the personal trainer group, but the differences in self-efficacy, and safetyattitudes were not significant.Discussion:The results support the value of using VR to train procedures that are dif-ficult to train in the real world and suggest that VR technologies can be useful forproviding just in time training anywhere, anytime, in a global market whereemployees are increasingly cross-cultural and dislocated.