Why aren't humans better prepared for natural disasters?
The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Under-Prepare For Disasters examines human behavior and disaster preparedness, trying to answer the question: why, with our ability to forsee and protect against natural catastrophes, do humans fail to protect ourselves and our communities from disaster? WWNO’s Jessica Rosgaard [JR] spoke to co-author Robert Meyer [RM] about how humans can overcome the psychological hurdles to disaster preparedness.
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JR: And that kind of brain response - that’s innate to humans, right - that is why officials will tell you to have a plan, or, you know, in case of fire, know where the exits are, know how you would get out of a situation, right - to kind of help, help your brain when faced with that sort of emergency?
RM: Yeah, that’s exactly right - and in fact we called our book the ostrich paradox to kind of build on that idea that, that one of the things is that often ostriches get a bad rap because often we sort of say the reason why we don’t prepare well for disasters is we turn the other way, we put our heads in the sand in the face of a disaster. And so the message of the book is look, we kind of just have to understand as human beings our brains just really are not well-designed for dealing with making good decisions about events which are very very rare and are potentially life-threatening, so what we need to do is basically develop a set of tools or a set of tricks to basically - to allow us to adapt to our own limitations. And things like developing a good home safety plan, for example, is a way of us kind of replacing the fact or anticipating the fact that if we don’t have one we’re going to be making decisions based on emotion which isn’t a good thing.
JR: So knowing that people have this innate sort of barrier - what’s the practical way, do you think, for local governments and community leaders to overcome these typical human responses as they urge disaster preparedness for something that is as routine as an annual hurricane season?
RM: Often its the case whenever a hurricane is approaching, what comes out? Well there’s often a hurricane preparation checklist, right, and it often will go on for a full page and it will say all these different things that you need to do for a hurricane. Well it turns out that actually people are very poor at being able to comprehend those checklists and the reason is they’re prone to what we call a simplification bias, what happens is people will go ahead and they’ll start going down that list and they’ll start doing one or two things but once they do one or two things their mind basically is sort of conditioned to say, ok, you’ve taken care of that problem. So as a consequence what happens is that often people will do one or two things but not necessarily do the most important things. A better checklist is one which starts off and says, look, if you’re gonna do only one thing to prepare for the storm this should be it.
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