Study: Disaster reporting can increase risk-taking
Digital Reporter
Friday, October 9, 2015, 3:21 PM - Researchers have found reporting on natural disasters like floods and earthquakes can have a paradoxical effect by influencing people to live in riskier places.
Active weather dominated headlines this year -- from record-breaking snow in Boston back in February to intense wildfires in western Canada over the summer.
Through it all, environmental agencies and broadcasters have been doing their best to keep the public informed.
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It's an important service intended to limit property damage and loss of life when severe weather strikes.
But the new study has shed light on how people react to disaster-prone areas in the months that follow, and the results are surprising.
"Most approaches to this problem assume that providing summaries of the nature and scale of disasters will lead people to reduce their exposure to risk," the study's authors write -- but the results of the paper "suggest that augmenting personal experience with information summaries of the number of adverse events (for example, storms, floods) in different regions may, paradoxically, increase the appeal of a disaster-prone region."
Researchers say disaster reporting may lead people to take more risks. (File photo).
For their study, researchers created a 'microworld' that contained three villages, each with a different level of disaster risk. During the trial, 400 volunteers were asked to choose where to live. They earned points, but lost them a disaster struck.
- One village was safe, but participants didn't earn many points for choosing it.
- The second village was worth more points if no disaster occurred, but rare disasters occurred 10% of the time in portions of the village.
- The third village had a 1% change of a widespread disaster occurring, making the overall risk equal to that of the second village.
Risks were communicated to participants prior to making a choice.
Researchers then mimicked the disaster reporting conditions found in real life, using personal experience, local sources and news from media and local authorities.
Participants were broken up into three groups. These groups were exposed to different levels of disaster reporting.
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"The key result was that the third group - people given the most information about recently experienced or avoided disasters – took more risks and were more likely to choose regions prone to disasters," lead author Ben Newell writes in a statement on Phys.org.
"Getting full information about all the villages, as is possible in real life through media and authorities, appeared to reinforce for people that 'most of the time nothing bad happens in the risky areas.' The increased tolerance for risk is akin to a person who is willing to trade daily access to the ocean with the rare risk of flooding from an abnormally high tide."
Researchers are quick to point out that more study needs to be done and advise against "generalizing too far."
Still, the findings could one day help disaster planners better understand how to communicate risk to the public.
