Masculine honor, social visibility, and safety non-compliance: intentions and approval judgments in high-risk sectors in Turkey

Unsafe work in high-risk sectors cannot be explained only by knowledge deficits or weak safety management; workers may also attach reputational meaning to visible compliance. Drawing on honor theory and occupational-safety research on risk perception and social context, this study examined whether masculine honor values (hereafter honor values)—the belief that a man’s worth depends partly on a publicly defensible reputation—were associated with unsafe work intentions, lower perceived risk, and greater approval of safety-rule non-compliance among male workers in Turkish construction and shipbuilding. A worker survey (N = 244) was combined with a within-person vignette experiment in which the focal hazard was held constant while visibility was manipulated and audience identity and prior social comment varied orthogonally. Honor values were positively associated with unsafe work intentions (H1a) and approval of others’ violations (H1b), and negatively associated with perceived risk (H2). Perceived risk partially accounted for the honor–intention association (H3). The association between honor values and approval of non-compliance was stronger when the violation was public rather than private (H4), consistent with a reputational, visibility-contingent account. These findings identify a micro-level sociocultural pathway that complements knowledge- and risk-based accounts of safety decisions. They also suggest that safety communication and supervisory practice should address the social meaning of compliance, while the cross-sectional mediation and judgment-based vignette outcome limit causal and behavioral inference.