Understanding Public Responses to Domestic Threats
Abstract
The overall goal of this report is to improve understanding of public responses to domestic threats. Project 1 focuses on pandemic influenza and dirty bomb threats, aiming to understand the role of emotions in anticipated behavioral responses. Project 2 examines a situation in which people are evacuated from a community to avoid exposure to radioactive fallout from an upwind nuclear explosion. This project aims to understand the factors that affect people's decisions about how long to wait until returning to their homes, given the gradual decline in radiation levels resulting from radioactive decay. First, the authors present an overview of each problem using models that summarize scientific knowledge. The models use logic of influence diagrams with nodes that reflect relevant variables affecting risk, and mitigating it, and links showing how they are connected. The models differ from traditional risk models because they include emotional and behavioral components that affect how a risk event unfolds. The Project 1 models focus on the interplay between emotional and behavioral responses to domestic threats, particularly fear and anger. The model for Project 2 focuses on the health, social, and economic factors that may affect people's decision to return to a community with residual radiation levels that elevate cancer risk. Second, they report on surveys of Canadian and U.S. participants based on these models. For Project 1, they found that, independent of anger and trait emotions, fear was related to seeing more risk of morbidity and mortality, and predicting less resilience, more compliance with mitigation strategies, and higher likelihood of being absent from work in the case of pandemic influenza. For Project 2, they found that people's decision to return were affected by the cancer risk of radioactive fallout as well as the availability of free housing in the evacuation zone.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2007
- Accession Number
- ADA477127
Entities
People
- Baruch Fischhoff
- Eric R. Stone
- H. K. Florig
- Julie S. Downs
- Wandi Bruine De Bruin
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University