Risk Perception and the Psychological Dimensions of Disaster

In this lecture, we'll review an important part of the human side of the hazard equation. For a hazard to exist and for it to have the potential of creating a disaster, there has to be an intersection between some kind of extreme event (or possibility for one) and people and their property in its path.

So, how do people arrange themselves and their "stuff" in space so as to be at risk, particularly when there is information available on the potential for exposure from science or historical memory?

This takes us into the murky reaches of human psychology: Do we perceive a hazard? Do we cognize its relevance for us as individuals? Do we know about things we could do to minimize our exposure? What motivates us to act (or not act) on that knowledge? What do people actually do during an emergency?

Literature on these subjects comes from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from environmental perception and behavioral geography through cultural anthropology and sociology into public health and psychology proper. A lot of it has developed in the context of technological hazards and lifestyle risks and then cross-fertilized with the natural hazards work.

A major finding is that lay perceptions differ markedly from expert perceptions, sometimes wildly overreacting to minor risks and other times blithely ignoring serious risks. A seminal work here was Kasperson et al. 1987. The social amplification of risk: A conceptual framework. Risk Analysis 8: 177-187.

• Risk amplification: exaggerating certain hazards
• Risk attenuation: trivializing others far from the expectations of risk assessors

Much effort has gone toward explaining these discrepancies between expert and lay perceptions.

Exasperated risk assessors sometimes state that the public is patently ignorant (the ignorance hypothesis): Its involvement in decisions concerning risks is, therefore, essentially valueless, if not counterproductive. Exasperation is understandable, but ours is supposed to be a democratic society, and you cannot leave the public out of the governance of risk. A book presenting this argument and trying to explain its sources is Mooney, Chris, and Kirschenbaum, Sheril. 2009. Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. New York: Basic Books.

• This interpretation has been tested by comparing laypeople's estimates of the probabilities and mechanisms of a risk with experts' estimates, the latter serving as a sort of baseline, which is presumed to be "objective."

• Results have been contradictory. This may be partly due to insufficient differentiation of the general public from the activist public. A summary of some of this work is in Johnson, Brandon B. 1993. Advancing understanding of knowledge's role in lay risk perception. Risk: Health, Safety, and Environment 4, 3: 189 ff. http://law.unh.edu/risk/vol4/summer/johnson.htm
  • In some studies, the more knowledge members of the public have about certain risks, the less concerned they are about them, yet activists often are well-informed.

  • In other studies, for example, of groundwater pollution, greater levels of public understanding creates heightened opposition to a hazardous technology.

Another line of inquiry has focused on the processes by which people process information in general (heuristics), as they apply to hazards. Findings suggest that the disparities between lay and expert perceptions are not completely random and unpredictable.

• Fairly consistently, people tend to overestimate the frequency of low probability but dramatic technological hazards (e.g., nuclear power plant accidents or airplane crashes) as compared with expert estimates. Somehow, a lot of people dying simultaneously is particularly unnerving.

• Similarly, the lay public tends to underestimate high probability hazards that are less dramatically memorable, such as certain lifestyle-mediated diseases or automobile accidents. Huge numbers of people dying each year singly or in small groups, as in car crashes, elicits far less concern than a smaller number of total deaths clustered in one incident.

• Results are less clear-cut with respect to natural hazards: earthquakes, extraterrestrial impacts, great floods. People seem to amplify hazards found "somewhere else" and attenuate the local ones. So, for example, a New Yorker might not be able to imagine how Californians tolerate living with earthquakes but is comfortable dealing with blizzards. He or she is probably not receptive at all to the significant earthquake hazard that does threaten the much less prepared New York City.
  • If this comes as a surprise to you, check out "Earthquakes may endanger New York more than thought, says study," a press release by The Earth Institute of Columbia University (08/21/08), which you can access here.

A potentially positive finding is that people's perceptions can become more accurate by dint of personal experience with a hazard that results in disaster.

• This was brought out in the classic Burton, Ian; Kates, Robert Williams, and White, Gilbert F. 1968. The Human Ecology of Extreme Geophysical Events. Florida Mental Health Institute Publications 78. In discussing flood hazard, they commented that "There is a weak relationship with previous experience that becomes most evident in areas where very heavy damange has been sustained" (p. 19).

• Risa Palm and colleagues had been doing a survey of Californians' perceptions of earthquake risk back in 1989 just before the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. They went back after the earthquake and resurveyed these same people after the quake to see how that disaster affected their perceptions. People's awareness of earthquake hazard went way up in the areas subjected to that quake and people's appreciation of just how bad a quake can affect them personally went up, too. Those in the area did become more receptive to buying earthquake insurance, while those not affected were not more likely to buy it from hearing about other areas that were affected. Palm, Risa, and Hodgson, Michael E. 1992. After a California Earthquake: Attitude and Behavior Change. University of Chicago Press.

• While there seems to be a salutary effect on people's perceptions of particular hazards, their own susceptibility to damage from them, and their willingness to follow through on at least some mitigations against them, it's not known whether experience with one kind of hazard might transfer to perceptions of and actions to other kinds of hazards.
  • Knuth et al. (2013) surveyed people in several countries in Europe who had survived a variety of emergencies. They found that the respondents were sensitized to the kinds of disaster they'd experienced (fires, floods, earthquakes, or terrorist incidents), and there were also some signs of weak cross-over effects: People who'd experienced one disaster were slightly more sensitized to different kinds of disaster. Knuth, Daniela; Kehl, Doris; Hulse, Lynn; and Schmidt, Silke. 2013. Risk perception, experience, and objective risk: A cross-national study with European emergency survivors. Risk Analysis Early View (not yet assigned to a volume/issue) doi: 10.1111/risa.12157

  • Whitmarsh (2008) found that English victims of flood disasters were no more aware of or motivated to do anything to mitigate their vulnerability to climate change, but victims of severe air pollution events were cross-sensitized to hazards of climate change. Climate change is expected to increase flood hazard in England, but flood exposure did not "map" to perceptions of climate change; air pollution is one of the drivers of climate change, so it's interesting that people injured by air pollution started thinking about climate change. Whitmarsh, Lorraine. 2008. Are flood victims more concerned about climate change than other people? The role of direct experience in risk perception and behavioural response. Journal of Risk Research 11, 3: 351-374.

• So, in all, there seems to be some propensity to learn from our personal experiences but less so from others' experiences outside our areas, and the degree of transfer of learning from personal experience of one hazard to another is unclear.

Another finding relates to misconceptions of exposure. There is some evidence that mediations between toxic releases and health effects are poorly understood in lay perception.

• That is, release equals exposure equals injury.

• The multiplicative reduction in risk probabilities at each point in the chain of events producing exposure seems lost. If a toxic release, say, requires a valve to fail, the pipe it meters to fail, and a containment building to fail, the risk is the probability of each of these events multiplied by one another, not added together. You might try playing around with made up probabilities of each of these three events, assigning any probabilities between 0.00 and 1.00, and then multiplying the three together to see what the overall probability of a release would be.

Related to this is a finding that people often make up their minds about an issue before being exposed to an adequate array of facts and arguments about it. Such premature decision-making often involves taking the position of a reference group they trust. Once the decision is made, people then often become very confident in their opinions. We see this all the time in virtually any political issue, but it applies equally to risk perception.

• Once the pattern gels one way or the other, new facts and arguments are fit into the framework in a way that further solidifies it

• This solidification avoids the cognitive dissonance of trying to entertain two mutually exclusive interpretations.
  • That is, someone who decides that there is a significant risk in a situation or technology will dismiss data that counterindicate the risk as faulty or from a corrupt and self-interested source.
  • Someone who has decided that there is no significant risk will equally dismiss data suggesting the risk is greater with similar denial mechanisms.

In defense of the public, there has been some intriguing research suggesting that the public may not be in fact so irrational and ignorant; rather, laypeople may simply be judging hazards along multiple axes, not just the quantifiable probability of mortality or morbidity, on which experts focus. A pioneering scholar in this context, who usually concentrates on technological or health hazards more than natural hazards, is Paul Slovic and his team at Decision Research in Oregon. An early piece laying out the argument is Fischhoff, Baruch; Slovic, Paul; and Lichtenstein, Sarah. 1982. Lay foibles and expert fables in judgments about risk. The American Statistician 36, 3, Part 2: 240- 255. The current state of the literature on risk perception and its often puzzling connections with actual behavior is summarized in Wachinger, Gisela; Renn, Ortwin; Begg, Chloe; and Kuhlicke, Christian. 2013. The risk perception paradox -- implications for governance and communication of natural hazards. Risk Analysis 33, 6: 1049-1065. doi: 10.1111/j.1539-6924.2012.01942.x.

• Perceived control is one of these other axes of judgment. People seem to judge hazards differently on the basis of the degree of perceived control they have over the exposure:
  • If they can choose the exposure (driving fast, snowboarding, smoking, living in pyrogenic vegetation), they often will accept substantial risks
  • But, if this is a risk they feel have no choice in, they may become very upset over the imposition of even the smallest risk (e.g., Alar in apples, thimerosal in vaccines, fluoridation of municipal water supplies).

• Familiarity is another closely related axis repeatedly emerging as important to lay response to a given hazard. Familiar hazards are tolerable; if a hazard arises from an unfamiliar technological source, it seems to evoke more concern than mortality and morbidity statistics would seem to warrant.

  • Cars and cigarettes are tolerable; nuclear power, food irradiation, and recombinant DNA provoke tremendous concern.

  • If you live in the coastal counties of California, earthquakes are a familiar hazard, but people elsewhere in the country can't imagine how we tolerate living under that kind of threat. If you live in Kansas, tornadoes are a familiar hazard and you know the drill; Californians find the whole idea completely freaky (never mind that we get them, too, but we call them "freak windstorms," "waterspouts," or, my personal favorite, "microbursts"). If you'd like to know more about this particular unsuspected hazard in Southern California, treat yourself to Davis, Mike. 1998. Our secret Kansas. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Ch. 4. New York: Metropolitan Books.

• Another axial theme in technological hazards literature is lay sensitivity to fairness issues. The public seems concerned to learn who gains and who loses from the deployment of a risky technology and, especially, whether the gainers and the losers are the same people.
  • If a corporation gets the profits from a hazardous installation and people in a given neighborhood get the health risk, concern in the neighborhood may escalate well out of proportion to the statistical probabilities of mortality and morbidity (injury, illness).

  • The Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) effect is one variation on this theme.

  • The environmental justice movement is another expression of this theme, compounded by variations in the income and race/ethnicity allocations of the risks and the benefits. Kristin Shrader-Frechette explores the ethical dimensions of this issue in her 2002 book, Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy (Oxford University Press).

• A prominent dimension consistently emerging in technological hazards literature is sometimes called the dread factor: Does a given hazard have the potential, no matter how small, of creating a really huge loss of life or particularly fearful diseases (e.g., cancer or AIDS or terrorism), or can it have effects that might be passed down through the generations? Is it linked with past incidents of overpowering horror? If so, such a hazard evokes sheer dread and, even if the probability of an accident is negligible, it will create concern and agitation far beyond the probabilities of mortality and morbidity.

• Another issue occasionally raised in hazards literature is public trust of institutions responsible for risk assessment, risk management, and emergency response. Public trust of governmental institutions in general seems to have hit a decades-long slide. This decline in trust has extended even to such agencies as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and NASA itself in the wake of conspiracy theorizing from both left and right and from a pervasive "X Files/Torchwood" mentality. 9/11 seemed to have reversed that to some extent, but COVID-19 seems to have heightened this tendency to conspiracy-theorizing in sizable sections of our population.

If the claim by some researchers (e.g., Johnson, Slovic, Shrader-Frechette, Margolis, Jasonoff) that the public, activist or uninvolved, may not be irrational is sound, one implication is that expert opinion may be flawed by too narrow a focus and, in its own way, as distorted as public (including activist) opinion. The dilemmas of scientific expertise in the minefields of political interests ... and the democratic oversight of risk and hazard ... are laid out in Jasonoff, Sheila. 2003. Accountability: (No?) accounting for expertise. Science and Public Policy 30, 3: 157-162.

Risk assessment scientists are not the only experts to suffer from faulty perceptions of public perceptions and behaviors in a disaster! The professional emergency management experts have often accepted and expended resources preparing for the infamous disaster myths (a recent evaluation of the pervasiveness of disaster myths among safety professionals and the general public is provided in Nogami, Tatsuya. 2018. Disaster myths among disaster response professionals and the source of such misconceptions. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 26, 4: 491-498. doi: 10.1111/1468-5973.12218).

• A few disaster myths:
  • Panic flight or competitive mass fleeing from a threat, with people jostling one another, knocking one another down, and trampling one another. This has happened in localized situations, but it is very rare in natural disasters and also in large sociogenic disasters (e.g., the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings). It is a psychological phenomenon to plan for in situations where there are short-term large concentrations of people in buildings or sites with limited exits, especially if they are emotionally worked up (e.g., concerts or sporting events) or intoxicated. But even in the World Trade Center towers, which certainly fit some of that description, people were evacuating in a very orderly manner, helping one another out, perhaps because of nearly a decade of practice evacuations implemented after the 1993 bombings. Indeed, instead of panic flight, most people stay put, to the point of evading evacuation orders and becoming hostile towards first-responders trying to get them to leave the area.

  • Shock is a common expectation: People are believed to become so overwhelmed by a great disaster that they just shut down, unable to cope, and become very dependent. In fact, such disaster shock is rare and, when it does happen, it tends to be short-lived. In fact, just after the main impacts hit, people start self-organizing to rescue others, re-unite children or pets with families, search out information, and start working on the "what to do now?" logistics. In many ways, this emergent behavior creates the real "first responders," who cope in myriad and creative ways until the professionals get there.

  • Help seeking is often misconstrued. A lot of planning goes into evacuation and emergency shelter provision, but the majority of people will first seek help from family and friends, sleeping on their couches and the like, and many may shelter in motels and hotels, if they have the resources. In the developed world, at least, only about 10-30 percent of evacuees will go to formally established shelters and tent cities. While these are necessary facilities to provide, the faulty professional perception of what people actually do just after a disaster could result in excessive efforts in this direction and perhaps diversion of efforts from more helpful activities.

  • Looting is one of the biggest expectations and concerns of the public and of the professional emergency management community. It does happen during civil disturbances, but there are very rare cases of looting in natural disasters, unless something very drastically wrong has happened in emergency response. So, there was very little such trouble in the Northidge earthquake, but there was after Katrina when people were stranded without food, water, and other supplies for several days. There is also a tendency to lump in all expropriative activities after a disaster as crime, which raises the salience of looting in public and emergency management perceptions and worries. Some looting is the result of antisocial activities of criminals preying on other people in the area; some, however, could be called "prosocial," as people take the necessities of physical existence that are not otherwise accessible in the chaos after a disaster as emergency response is overwhelmed. A concise review of the literature on looting in civil disturbance and natural disaster contexts is provided in Carrasco-Jiménez, Edison. 2019. The looting during the social upsurge of October 2019 in Chile. SocArXiv 10 December. doi: 10.31325/osf.io/cyegn. Available from https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/cyegn/.

  • Crime of other sorts is also a major fear of both the public and emergency management. The expectation is that natural disaster will unleash all kinds of antisocial behavior and the crime rate will skyrocket. In fact, the crime rate seems to go down in the wake of a great disaster. This decrease might be partly because law enforcement, pressed into emergency response activities, just doesn't go after the usual intoxication, speeding, and other minor crimes, or perhaps because criminals, like everyone else, are hunkered down trying to stay alive or glued to the TV. A first look at crime data for several American cities that generally shows no significant change in criminal activity in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic is published in Ashby, Michael P.J. 2020. Initial evidence on the relationship between the coronavirus pandemic and crime in the United States. Crime Science 9, 6: 1-16. doi: 10.1186/s40163-020-00117-6 (available open- access at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s40163-020-00117- 6.pdf. Global trends in crime during COVID-19 lockdowns show a drop, probably related to lockdowns, per Boman, John H., IV, and Mowen, Thomas J. 2021. Global crime trends during COVID-19. Nature Human Behaviour 5: 821-822. Available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01151-3. Even as overall crime rates dropped, however, certain crimes increased, notably domestic violence, murder, and cybercrime, per Boman, John H., IV, and Gallupe, Owen. 2020. Has COVID-19 changed crime? Crime rates in the United States during the pandemic. American Journal of Criminal Justice 45, 4: 537-545. doi: 10.1007/s12103-020-09551-3 . Northeastern University has a synopsis of crime trends by crime types: How COVID-19 changed crime in the U.S. (27 January 2023): https://publicaffairs.northeastern.edu/articles/us-crime-rate-during-pandemic/.

  • Disposing of the dead. There is a wide belief that dead bodies in the streets will cause disease and that they should, therefore, be disposed of as soon as possible, in mass graves if necessary. People confuse the smell of death with disease. Sometimes the dead did have communicable diseases (e.g., hepatitis or HIV) and this can pose some risk for those handling them, but ordinary PPE mitigates that risk. Ebola is highly contagious during handling of the dead, so processes and PPE have evolved for this unique situation. In general, however, the living are safe from the dead, no matter how awful their condition or smell. Anonymous mass burial does far more harm to those who loved the dead than any sanitation benefit, forever precluding closure and knowing for sure what happened to their loved ones. This issue came up with the case of all the fragmented human remains from 9/11. The government decided to bury all the unidentified bits in the base of the new WTC, a mass grave. This was extremely upsetting to some of the families, who still hoped for DNA tests to be done, while other families accepted this as a form of closure. Best practices have been formalized in the World Health Organization, Pan American Health Organization, and International Committee of the Red Cross in Management of Dead Bodies after Disasters: A Field Manual for First Responders (2006, 2016) and you can learn more at Ellingham, Sarah; Cordner, Stephen; and Tidball-Binz, Morris. 2016. Revised practical guidance for first responders managing the dead after disasters. International Review of the Red Cross 98,2: 647-669. doi: 10.1017/S181638317000248. It is accessible through Google Scholar.

• So, there are disaster myths, faulty perceptions and unexamined expectations that are shared not only by the public but by many in the professional emergency management community. The problem is that they may lead to misguided emergency response and the misallocation of scarce resources. Agencies may plan for panic flight when the real problem may be getting people to evacuate. Law enforcement may prioritize the prevention of crime and looting rather than help out in search and rescue or evacuation.

• A classic compilation of these and other disaster myths can be found in Wenger, Dennis E.; Dykes, James D.; Sebok, Thomas D.; and Neff, Joan L. 1975. It's a matter of myths: An empirical examination of individual insight into disaster response. Mass Emergencies 1: 33-46. A discussion of disaster myth pervasiveness in future emergency workers is found in Alexander, David E. 2007. Misconception as a barrier to teaching about disasters. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 22, 2: 95-103.

• The decades-long awareness of disaster myths in the social science literature has not been matched by policy changes. Indeed, disaster myths have been used to reframe emergency response around policing or martial concerns, sometimes redirecting and squandering emergency response resources on the abatement of looting and crime control. A recent article draws out these legal ramifications of emergency response, focussing on the Katrina disaster, which was rife with disaster mythology and proportionally ineffective response. Sun, Lisa Grow. 2011. Disaster mythology and the law. Cornell Law Review 96: 1131-1208.

One of the major, enduring impacts of a disaster, both for the public and for first-responders, is psychological. The intense sudden mortal fear of a rapid onset disaster, the grinding and ratcheting up fear of a creeping disaster (think about your own dawning recognition that maybe COVID-19 is going to be a major disaster in your own personal life), the sight of grievously injured or dead victims, the loss of loved ones, survivor's guilt, the urgings of conscience to keep going and helping out far beyond physical endurance, the loss of things (homes, treasured possessions) that can never be exactly replaced -- all these induce a complex of psychological pain and perceptual and behavioral dysfunction that can endure for years and be retriggered by random weird things that remind you of the event.

• This affliction was perhaps first recognized in veterans of conflicts: shell shock, soldier's heart, battle fatigue.

• More recently, its similarities to what victims of disasters and crimes experience have been recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

• A more recent development has been the recognition that the professionals who respond to disaster are also subject to this: firefighters, nurses, doctors, police officers, Red Cross volunteers. People in these professions have all sorts of "do it yourself" coping mechanisms for the stress: cultivating an ability to dissociate (how a surgeon or operating room nurse deals with surgery), very noir humor (firefighters' jokes about "roasts"), trying to just bury their emotions to avoid feeling or being perceived as somehow weak (which backfires on those around one), or "self- medicating."

• Increasingly, psychological support services will be deployed, not just to meet the needs of disaster victims, but to help emergency services personnel avoid burnout, retain the ability for ongoing work, recognize PTSD symptoms, and have somewhere to go if there are enduring side effects to their service. One firefighter (Karyophillis Demosthenes) fighting the August and September 2023 firestorms in Greece, succinctly stated the need: "Our mind and our soul want to go to fire, but our body is very tired" (Emmanouilidou, Lydia. 2023. Firefighters struggle to contain severe wildfires in northern Greece. All Things Considered. NPR (1 September). 3-Minute Li

• A useful compendium of resources on disaster-related mental health is Baldwin, David V. 2016. Disaster mental health, David Baldwin's Trauma Information Pages. Available at http://www.trauma-pages.com/disaster.php

  Another very practical compendium is Brown, Julie; Davis, Amy; and Davis, Christy. 2004. Psychological Support in Disasters: Facilitating Psychological Support for Catastrophic Events. San Clemente, CA: Law Tech Custom Publishing.

Environmental perception, then, is something of a minefield for the hazards community. The public may well see things entirely differently from risk assessment scientists and crisis management practitioners, and that will affect their behavior before, during, and after a disaster. Many of the perceptual biases in disaster are rooted in media. The rôle of media in constructing hazard perception and representing disaster will be explored in a later lecture.

There may be long-term distortions of normal perception and behavior after a disaster, both in the public and in the professional emergency service personnel.

It is easy to be nonplussed by public perceptions and the perplexing behaviors they can set off (and to recognize that we, too, are subject to these issues), but it is something everyone in the hazards community needs to learn more about and then try to find effective ways of public education and risk communication that work with (and around) these oddities of perception. Successful crisis management may depend on it, not to mention effective disaster mitigation and preparation.

Another lecture will take up lessons learned in public education and risk communication.

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Last revision: 09/01/23